Arcadi Navarro and Tomàs Marquès-Bonet

Group websites: Tomàs Marquès-Bonet and Arcadi Navarro

Research Outline

Life as we see it today has been shaped by countless biological processes that left signatures in our genomes in the form of differences between species or between individuals. Interrogating such patterns of genome diversity we tackle questions on the forces that affect living organisms, how and when they act and how do they affect phenomena such as biodiversity or senescence.

What makes us human is one of the most fundamental questions. We analyze full genomes, epigenomes and transcriptomes to ascertain processes, variants and molecular features that are intrinsic to our species, thus advancing knowledge on human-specific features.

Research Lines

Genomic variation in ape genomes

Characterizing the variation of thousands of human genomes is standard today. However, primates (our closest relatives) are the ideal set of species for studying the evolution of these features from both mechanistic and adaptive points of view.

Epigenetics and transcriptomics of non-human primates

The dynamics of DNA methylation and regulatory changes between humans and their closest relatives are still poorly understood. In this project, we evaluate global gene regulation patterns in recent human evolution to identify potential contributor to the base of human-specific molecular traits.

The evolution of senescence

Senescence is a progressive, inevitable, irreversible, and time-dependent decline in physiological function that affects most organisms, which eventually leads to death. Senescence is arguably the major biological and biomedical challenge of the 21st century but it is also a fascinating and old evolutionary problem that we try to tackle with new tools.

Team during 2019-20

PhD students: Marc Palmada Flores, Harvinder Pawar, Johanna Krueger, Marina Alvarez Estape, Luis Ferrandez Peral, Paula Esteller Cucala, Xavier Farré Ramón, Alejandro Valenzuela Seba, Jordi Rambla de Argila, Jose Maria Heredia Genestar 

Postdocs: Aitor Serres Armero, Joseph Orkin, Esther Lizano Gonzalez, David Juan Sopeña, Belén Lorente Galdós, Marc de Manuel Montero, Carlos Morcillo Suarez, Marco Telford, Gerard Muntané Medina

Technicians: Armida Faella, Pol Alentorn, Sandra Ruibal Puertas, Caterina Mata Garcia, Claudia Fontseré Alemany, Lukas Kuderna

Selected publications 

• M Kuhlwilm, S Han, VC Sousa, L Excoffier, Tomas Marques-Bonet “Ancient admixture from an extinct ape lineage into bonobos”. Nature ecology & evolution, 2019 10.1038_s41559-019-0881-7

• Frido Welker, Jazmín Ramos-Madrigal, Martin Kuhlwilm, Wei Liao, Petra Gutenbrunner, Marc de Manuel, Diana Samodova, Meaghan Mackie, Morten E Allentoft, Anne-Marie Bacon, Matthew J Collins, Jürgen Cox, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Jesper V Olsen, Fabrice Demeter, Wei Wang*, Tomas Marques-Bonet *, Enrico Cappellini* “Enamel proteome shows that Gigantopithecus was an early diverging pongine”  Nature 576 (7786), 262-265

• Heredia-Genestar, J.M., T. Marquès-Bonet, D. Juan and A. Navarro*. (2020) Extreme differences between human germline and tumor mutation densities are driven by ancestral human-specific deviations. Nature Communications 11:1-9. (doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-16296-4).

• Sinding MS, Gopalakrishnan S, Ramos-Madrigal J, de Manuel M, Pitulko VV, Kuderna L, Feuerborn TR, Frantz LAF, Vieira FG, Niemann J, Samaniego Castruita JA, Carøe C, Andersen-Ranberg EU, Jordan PD, Pavlova EY, Nikolskiy PA, Kasparov AK, Ivanova VV, Willerslev E, Skoglund P, Fredholm M, Wennerberg SE, Heide-Jørgensen MP, Dietz R, Sonne C, Meldgaard M, Dalén L, Larson G, Petersen B, Sicheritz-Pontén T, Bachmann L, Wiig Ø, Tomas Marques-Bonet+, Hansen AJ+, Gilbert MTP+. “Arctic-adapted Dogs Emerged at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition” Science. 2020 Jun 26;368(6498):1495-1499. doi: 10.1126/science.aaz8599.

• Brasó-Vives M, Povolotskaya IS, Hartasánchez DA, Farré X, Fernandez-Callejo M, Raveendran M, Harris RA, Rosene DL, Lorente-Galdos B, Navarro A, Tomas Marques-Bonet+, Rogers J+, Juan D+. “Copy number variants and fixed duplications among 198 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)” PLoS Genet. 2020 May 11;16(5):e1008742. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1008742. eCollection 2020 May.

Other relevant information 

Tomàs Marquès-Bonet: M ERC Consolidator 2019.

Arcadi Navarro: Director of the European Genome-phenome Archive (ww.ega-archive.org) at the Center for Genome Regulation (CRG).

Director of the BarcelonaBeta Brain Research Center (BBRC).

Director of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation (FPM).