Marco Catoni

I graduated at the University of Torino (Italy) in Plant Biotechnology. During my PhD at University of Torino and the Italian National Research Council, I worked on the characterization of mechanisms of transgenic resistance to viruses in tomato. Then, I moved in the laboratory of Prof Jerzy Paszkowski at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and then at The Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (UK), where I worked on plant epigenetics and transposable elements mobilization. In 2018 I moved to the University of Birmingham with an independent research position, and in 2024 I have been promoted to Associate Professor. In my laboratory we are combining molecular biology, genomics and computational approaches to study genome plasticity and epigenetics in model and crop plants. This includes but it is not limited to the study of transgenerational epigenetic memory, priming, transposable elements regulation and mobilisation, dynamics of extrachromosomal DNA and viral elements, mobile nucleic acid molecules and horizontal gene transfer between plants and other organisms.