Centre for Genomic Regulation
Description of organisation
The Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) is an international biomedical research institute of excellence whose mission is to discover and advance knowledge for the benefit of society, public health and economic prosperity. The CRG believes that the medicine of the future depends on the ground-breaking science of today. This requires an interdisciplinary scientific team focused on understanding the complexity of life from the genome to the cell to a whole organism and its interaction with the environment, offering an integrated view of genetic diseases. The centre offers outstanding expertise in systems biology, genomics and computational biology, and is equipped with state-of-the-art core facilities, offering omics technologies (proteomics, next generation sequencing) and advanced light microscopy.
Previous experience
Luis Serrano is the director at the CRG since 2011. He coordinates the European project on “Systems biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis” (SysteMTb), and participates in several other FP7 projects (PRIMES, PROSPECTS, PRIME-XS). In 2006, he established the EMBL-CRG Systems Biology programme, a successful partnership between CRG and EMBL to understand the complexity of biological systems. The programme is an active partner in the ESFRI initiative on bioimaging (Euro-BioImaging), and Systems Biology (ISBE). Roderic Guigó has been one of the few European PIs involved since the beginning in the pioneering ENCODE project, and he also participates in other large international scientific initiatives, including one ICGC project focusing on Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia and the IHEC project Blueprint. He is involved in projects funded by the EU (4), NIH (4), and GlaxoSmithKline. With Alfonso Valencia, he founded the National Institute of Bioinformatics, where he leads the Genomics node. Both Serrano and Guigó hold an ERC advanced grant.
Profile of staff members
Luis Serrano is director at the CRG, leads the group on “Design of Biological Systems”, and has published more than 270 articles in peer reviewed journals. He is an internationally renowned expert in systems biology of eukaryotic and microbial organisms, and in protein design, and he conceived the development of several algorithms such as FoldX. Roderic Guigó is the coordinator of the Bioinformatics and Genomics programme. His group is internationally recognized in the field of Computational Genomics, and focuses on understanding the information encoded in genomic sequences, and how this information is processed in the pathway leading from DNA to protein sequences. Guigó is also involved in the development of software for gene prediction and annotation in genomic sequences. Michela Bertero is the head of the international and scientific affairs office, and manages all coordinated European projects at the institute.
Webpage
Five recent publications relevant to the project
1) Transcription start site associated RNAs in bacteria. Yus E, Güell M, Vivancos AP, Chen WH, Lluch-Senar M, Delgado J, Gavin AC, Bork P, Serrano L. Mol Syst Biol. 2012 May 22;8:585. doi: 10.1038/msb.2012.16.
2) Transcriptome complexity in a genome-reduced bacterium. Güell M, van Noort V, Yus E, Chen WH, Leigh-Bell J, Michalodimitrakis K, Yamada T, Arumugam M, Doerks T, Kühner S, Rode M, Suyama M, Schmidt S, Gavin AC, Bork P, Serrano L. Science. 2009 Nov 27;326(5957):1268-71
3) Cell type-specific importance of ras-c-raf complex association rate constants for MAPK signaling. Kiel C, Serrano L. Sci Signal. 2009 Jul 28;2(81):ra38.
4) Landscape of transcription in human cells. Djebali S, Davis CA, Merkel A, Dobin A, Lassmann T, Mortazavi A, Tanzer A, Lagarde J, Lin W, Schlesinger F, Xue C, Marinov GK, Khatun J, Williams BA, Zaleski C, Rozowsky J, Röder M, Kokocinski F, Abdelhamid RF, Alioto T, Antoshechkin I, Baer MT, Bar NS, Batut P, Bell K, Bell I, Chakrabortty S, Chen X, Chrast J, Curado J, Derrien T, Drenkow J, Dumais E, Dumais J, Duttagupta R, Falconnet E, Fastuca M, Fejes-Toth K, Ferreira P, Foissac S, Fullwood MJ, Gao H, Gonzalez D, Gordon A, Gunawardena H, Howald C, Jha S, Johnson R, Kapranov P, King B, Kingswood C, Luo OJ, Park E, Persaud K, Preall JB, Ribeca P, Risk B, Robyr D, Sammeth M, Schaffer L, See LH, Shahab A, Skancke J, Suzuki AM, Takahashi H, Tilgner H, Trout D, Walters N, Wang H, Wrobel J, Yu Y, Ruan X, Hayashizaki Y, Harrow J, Gerstein M, Hubbard T, Reymond A, Antonarakis SE, Hannon G, Giddings MC, Ruan Y, Wold B, Carninci P, Guigó R, Gingeras TR. Nature. 2012 Sep 6;489(7414):101-8. doi: 10.1038/nature11233
5) Nucleosome positioning as a determinant of exon recognition. Tilgner H, Nikolaou C, Althammer S, Sammeth M, Beato M, Valcárcel J, Guigó R. Nat Struct Mol Biol. 2009 Sep;16(9):996-1001.