Research

The general topics that interest us revolve around the genomics in the study levels that go from the individual to the population. We want to address questions about the individuals, their identities, their phenotypes, and their genomes. Or about groups of individuals connected by shallow or deep genealogical links marked by their surnames or their Y chromosomes. Or about populations, their history, and their interaction as revealed by the bits and pieces of their genomes they have exchanged, never forgetting that these exchanges involved actual people, communicating with their languages and moving with the flow of history.

This vision is currently implemented  in two main projects:

• Demography and selection in isolated populations. After our work in Eivissa, in which we discovered that the authocthonous islanders are a genetic outlier due to their historically small population size (but, nonetheless, they haven't accumulated an excessive mutation burden), we are initiating a collaboration with Angelica Boldt (Universidade Federal do Paraná) and Elena Bosch (IBE), on the Brazilian and Bolivian Mennonites, a religious isolate.

• Mitochondrial DNA diversity and phylogeny. We described the mitogenome diversity in the resident population of Catalonia and in El Salvador, with a focus on its applications to forensic genetics. We are currently describing the mtDNA diversity on East African populations (with Hisham Hassan, Bahrain Defence Force Hospital), and the Balearic Islands, in order to infer their demographic history. With Vladimir Bajić (Robert Koch Institute, Berlin), we are collaborating in a project led by Nicole Huber (Institute of Legal Medicine, Innsbruck) to produce a stable phylogeny of human mtDNA that can be used as a current reference in forensic and population genetics.