Contact
Email: oscar-andres.estrada@univ-tlse3.fr
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5803-7007
Twitter: @oscarixox
Academic Background
Oscar Estrada is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie IEF postdoctoral researcher in the AGES group. His project entitled PALEOQUINOA*: Rescuing the Adaptive Secrets of Ancient Quinoa aims to generate the first genome-scale dataset of ancient quinoa and characterise the domestication history of this crop.
Oscar is interested in evolutionary biology, population genomics, and domestication. He has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in biological sciences. In 2019, Oscar received a PhD in Genetics and Evolution at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide (Australia). During his PhD, he used DNA sequences from ancient, historical, and modern plant material to study the domestication and evolution of polyploid species such as wheat and quinoa. Soon after his PhD, he continued working as a research affiliate and bioinformatician of the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the University of Adelaide. In 2020, Oscar joined the AGES group as a postdoctoral researcher of the ANR-funded EVOSHEEP project, where he investigated the genomic diversity of ancient sheep breeds from Southwest Asian societies.
In 2021, Oscar was awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship for his project PALEOQUINOA. Led by Prof Ludovic Orlando, the PALEOQUINOA project started in July 2022; where Oscar is currently using ancient DNA methods, high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics data mining and analysis to examine the evolutionary changes associated with quinoa domestication.
*This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101032990.
Selected Presentations
- Ancient DNA and its applications in the study of quinoa domestication. University of Tucuman. San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina. April 18, 2023.
- Reconstructing the Genetic Makeup of Ancient Sheep Breeds from West Asia. AnimalFarm Conference. Toulouse, France. June 11-13, 2022.
- VINICULTURE: Grapes and wines in France from the origins of viticulture to the Middle Ages. 9th International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology ISBA9. Toulouse, France. June 1-4, 2021.
- Ancient chloroplast and nuclear genomes provide insights into the evolutionary history of quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.). The Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) XXVI Conference. San Diego, The United States of America. January 11-15, 2020.
- New advances in ancient DNA analysis: applications in plant domestication. Instituto Superior de Estudios Sociales, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (ISES, CONICET). San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina. April 27, 2018.
- Assessing the variability of plant ion transporter genes through time using modern and ancient DNA. The Plant and Animal Genome (PAG) XXVI Conference. San Diego, The United States of America. January 13-17, 2018.
Selected Publications
- Liu, X., Seguin-Orlando, A., Chauvey, L., Tressières, G., Schiavinato, S., Tonasso-Calvière, L., Aury, J. M., Perdereau, A., Wagner, S., Clavel, P., Estrada, O., … Orlando, L. (2023). DNA methylation-based profiling of horse archaeological remains for age-at-death and castration. IScience, 26(3).
- Estrada, O., Richards, S. M., & Breen, J. (2022). Discovering the Secrets of Ancient Plants: Recovery of DNA from Museum and Archaeological Plant Specimens. In Methods in Molecular Biology (Vol. 2512, pp. 261–267). Humana Press Inc.
- Richards S. M., Breen J., Hovhannisyan N., Estrada O., Gasparyan, B., … Zhang, H. (2022). Recovery of Chloroplast Genomes from Medieval Millet Grains Excavated from the Areni-1 Cave in Southern Armenia. Scientific Reports, 12(1).
- Clavel B., Lepetz S., Chauvey L., Schiavinato S., Tonasso-Calvière L., … Orlando, L. (2022). Sex in the city: Uncovering sex-specific management of equine resources from prehistoric times to the Modern Period in France. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 41. 103341.
- Lepetz S., Clavel B., Alioğlu D., Chauvey L., Schiavinato S., … Orlando L. (2021). Historical management of equine resources in France from the Iron Age to the Modern Period. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 40, 103250.
- Vila E., Abrahami P., Albesso M., Amane A., Bader, C., … Vuillien M. (2021). EVOSHEEP: the makeup of sheep breeds in the ancient Near East. Antiquity, 95(379), 1–8.
- Estrada O, Breen J, Richards S.M, and Cooper A. (2018). Ancient plant DNA in the genomic era. Nature Plants (2018). doi:10.1038/s41477-018-0187-9.