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I’m Alexander Lucaci

Ecological interactions and genomic innovation fueled the evolution of ray-finned fish endothermy

Science Advances • 2025

Endothermy has independently evolved in several vertebrate lineages but remains rare among fishes. Using an integrated approach combining phylogenomic and ecomorphological data for 1051 ray-finned fishes, a time-dependent evolutionary model, and comparative genomic analyses of 205 marine vertebrates, we show that ecological interactions with modern cetaceans coincided with the evolution of endothermy in ray-finned fishes during the Eocene-Miocene.

The Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) and international astronaut biobank

Nature • 2024

Spaceflight induces molecular, cellular and physiological shifts in astronauts and poses myriad biomedical challenges to the human body, which are becoming increasingly relevant as more humans venture into space. Yet current frameworks for aerospace medicine are nascent and lag far behind advancements in precision medicine on Earth, underscoring the need for rapid development of space medicine databases, tools and protocols.

Evolutionary Shortcuts via Multinucleotide Substitutions and Their Impact on Natural Selection Analyses

MBE • 2023

Inference and interpretation of evolutionary processes, in particular of the types and targets of natural selection affecting coding sequences, are critically influenced by the assumptions built into statistical models and tests. If certain aspects of the substitution process (even when they are not of direct interest) are presumed absent or are modeled with too crude of a simplification, estimates of key model parameters can become biased, often systematically, and lead to poor statistical performance.

RASCL: Rapid Assessment of Selection in CLades through molecular sequence analysis

PLoS ONE • 2022

An important unmet need revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic is the near-real-time identification of potentially fitness-altering mutations within rapidly growing SARS-CoV-2 lineages. Although powerful molecular sequence analysis methods are available to detect and characterize patterns of natural selection within modestly sized gene-sequence datasets, the computational complexity of these methods and their sensitivity to sequencing errors render them effectively inapplicable in large-scale genomic surveillance contexts.

Rapid epidemic expansion of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in southern Africa

Nature • 2022

The SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in southern Africa has been characterized by three distinct waves. The first was associated with a mix of SARS-CoV-2 lineages, while the second and third waves were driven by the Beta (B.1.351) and Delta (B.1.617.2) variants, respectively. In November 2021, genomic surveillance teams in South Africa and Botswana detected a new SARS-CoV-2 variant associated with a rapid resurgence of infections in Gauteng province, South Africa.

The Subway’s Invisible Microbiome

AMNH SciCafe • Feb 4, 2026 • New York, NY

Public talk on how urban metagenomics reveals hidden microbial and viral ecosystems in the NYC subway and how localized sampling scales into global atlas-building and biosurveillance efforts.

Viral evolution in the cosmos

Book Chapter • Fundamentals of Space Medicine and Clinical Technology • 2026

Space travel exposes human beings to unique environmental stressors (e.g., radiation, microgravity) and induces significant physiological changes in hosts, profoundly impacting host–virus dynamics and creating conditions conducive to viral evolution.

A VAST New View of Viruses

Media • Weill Cornell Medicine • 2025

A major new effort at Weill Cornell Medicine seeks to catalog the normal human virome, the immense ecosystem of viruses that lives in and on us. The work, part of a multi-institution collaboration called Viromes Across Space and Time (VAST), supported by the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, will pioneer new techniques, illuminate a crucial aspect of human biology that was impossible to study before, and establish a baseline set of data that could help in preventing, diagnosing and treating disease.

Assessing evolutionary pressures on the SARS-CoV-2 Mu (B.1.621) clade

Blog post • Virological • 2021

We identify genomic sites in μ (B.1.621, Latif et al. 2021) clade sequences that may be subject to selective forces and could be prioritized for further studies, but have not yet reached high frequencies.