Jaume Bertranpetit

Group website

Research Outline

Our goal is to understand our own evolutionary history. We use genomics as a tool to study the basic molecular mechanisms that have shaped our genomes. Our main interest is to understand adaptation through the detection of positive (adaptive) selection in the genome. We apply tools from network theory and systems biology to discover the genetic bases of complex adaptations.

 

Research Lines

We study natural selection and adaptation in humans and primates through the comparative analysis of genomes. Its purpose is to understand complex adaptations through genome-wide analyses of the footprints that natural selection has left in genomes and attempt to place selection in a functional molecular framework of molecular pathways. The Evolutionary Systems Biology Lab is studying differential adaptation among human populations, including several African populations, Roma (as compared to Romanians and Indians) and in Chimpanzees. It has launched a project with the analysis of the haploid sequences of several individuals from all known groups of Southeast Asian pygmies.

 

Team during 2017-18

  • Postdocs: Hafid Laayouni (Senior Scientist), Gabriela Aguileta, Sandra Acosta.
     
  • PhD students: Begoña Dobon, Jessica Nye, Sandra Walsh, Pablo Villegas.
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Selected publications 2017-18

  • Paula Jofré, Payel Das, Jaume Bertranpetit and Robert Foley. Cosmic phylogeny: reconstructing the chemical history of the solar neighbourhood with an evolutionary tree. MNRAS (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) 467, 1140–1153 (2017) doi:10.1093/mnras/stx075.
  • Mayukh Mondal, Anders Bergström, Yali Xue, FrancescCalafell, Hafid Laayouni, Ferran Casals, Partha P. Majumder, Chris Tyler-Smith* and Jaume Bertranpetit*. Y-Chromosomal sequences of diverse Indian populations and the ancestry of the Andamanese. Human Genetics 2017; 136(5):499-510.
  • Maja P. Greminger, Alexander Nater, Tugce Bilgin Sonay, Marc Pybus, Marc de Manuel Montero, Tariq Desai, Guillem de Valles, Ferran Casals, Javier Prado-Martinez, Benoit Goossens, Ernst J. Verschoor, Kristin S. Warren, Ian Singleton, Laurentius N. Ambu, David Marques, Joko Pamungkas, Dyah Perwitasari-Farajallah, Puji Rianti, Ivo G. Gut, Marta Gut, Pablo Orozco-terWengel, Carel P. van Schaik, Jaume Bertranpetit, Maria Anisimova, Aylwyn Scally, Tomas Marques-Bonet, and Michael Krützen. Morphometric, behavioral, and genomic evidence for a new orangutan species. Current Biology. 2017 S0960-9822(17)31245-9.
  • Jessica Nye, Hafid Laayouni, Martin Kuhlwilm, Mayukh Mondal, Tomas Marques-Bonet and Jaume Bertranpetit. Selection in the Introgressed Regions of the Chimpanzee Genome. Genome Biology and Evolution. Genome Biology and Evolution 2018 10: 1132-1138.
  • Mayukh Mondal, Ferran Casals, Partha P. Majumder, Jaume Bertranpetit. Further confirmation for unknown archaic ancestry in Andaman and South Asia. Reply to 'No evidence for unknown archaic ancestry in South Asia'. Nature Genetics 2018 50: 1637-1639.

 

 

Other relevant information 2017-18

  • Docteur Honoris Causa de l’Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier. Nomination octubre 2017. Received in 2018.
  • Invited speaker at the Genome Evolution Mishima (GEM) Meeting in honor of Motoo Kimura. “The detection and interpretation of adaptive selection in human populations: Much Ado About Nothing?” Mishima 27/29-03-2017.
  • Invited Keynote Speaker at the NGS’17: Structural Variation and Population Genomics, organized by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). “Unveiling the information in the variation in the human genome: from ancestry to adaptation” Barcelona, 3/5-04-2017.
  • Scientific Commitee of the B-Debate Meeting on “Natural selection in humans. Understanding our adaptations”, held in Barcelona 17/18 July 2017. Plenary talk “The detection and interpretation of adaptive selection in human populations: an introduction”.
  • Invited Inaugural talk at the I2SysBio (Institute for Integrative Systems Biology). “Natural selection in functional pathways: an approach to evolutionary systems biology”. Valencia, 12-February-2018.