After completing a PhD on fly genetics in the laboratory of Pedro Ripoll at the Centre for Molecular Biology (CBM, Madrid, Spain), Cayetano González moved to David Glover's lab in the UK, first as a postdoc at Imperial College in London and later as a CRC Joint Principal Investigator at University of Dundee. In 1994, he took his first independent position, as a Group Leader at EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany). After the customary nine-year period at EMBL, he moved to the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO, Madrid, Spain). In 2004 he moved to his present post at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) where he leads the Cell Division Group. In 2007 he was elected to full membership of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO).
Research interests
We use Drosophila to investigate the molecular and cell biological mechanisms that drive cell proliferation and malignant growth.
Ongoing research lines include the following.
(1) Drosophila models of paediatric cancer.
(2) The molecular basis of sex-linked differences in cancer.
(3)The role of cancer-testis (a.k.a. cancer-germline) genes in somatic malignant growth.
Selected publications
- Goupil A, Heinen JP, Salame R, Rossi F, Reina J, Pennetier C, Simon A, Skorski P, Louzao A, Bardin A, Basto R & Gonzalez C 2022, 'Illuminati, a form of gene expression plasticity in Drosophila neural stem cells', Development 149 (22): dev200808.
- Molnar C, Reina J, Herrero A, Heinen JP, Méndiz V, Bonnal S, Irimia M, Sánchez-Jiménez M, Sánchez-Molina S, Mora J & Gonzalez C 2022, 'Human EWS-FLI protein recapitulates in Drosophila the neomorphic functions that induce Ewing sarcoma tumorigenesis', PNAS Nexus, 6, 1(4), pgac222.
- Deng Q, Wang C, Tat Koe C, Heinen JP, Sing Tan Y, Li S, Gonzalez C, Sung WK & Wang H 2022, 'Tumour Suppressor Parafibromin/Hyrax Governs Cell Polarity and Centrosome Assembly in Neural Stem Cells', PLOS Biology, 12;20(10):e3001834.
- Climent-Cantó P, Molnar C, Santabárbara-Ruiz P, Prieto C, Abril JF, Serras F & Gonzalez C 2022, 'Oxidative Stress Is Associated with Overgrowth in Drosophila l(3)mbt Mutant Imaginal Discs', Cells, 11, 16, 2542.