Tomàs Marquès-Bonet

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

Life & Medical Sciences

Dr. Marquès-Bonet is the Principal Investigator of the group "Comparative Genomics" at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE; UPF/CSIC) and at the CRG-CNAG. He started his own lab in 2010 with an ERC Starting Grant and was selected as ICREA in 2011. In 2013 he was selected for the EMBO young Investigator award. He has been part of many genome consortia, leading the section of duplications and structural variation in most of them. Starting in 2016, he is the vice-director of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology.

His group wants to characterize human specific genomics features, including the evolution of epigenetics in humans or the impact of CNVs in phenotypic traits. With a total of more than 80 peer-reviewed publications, he has published as a senior authorship in Science (2016), Nature (2013), Genome Research (2015) and Plos Genetics (2013, 2015) among others.


Research interests

What makes us human? This is a fundamental question in many disciplines. Our team analyzes a wide range of genome variants to determine processes, variants and molecular features that are intrinsic to our species. To do so, we study full genome, epigenomes and transcriptomic sequences of humans and great apes for a better understanding of human specific features.

Selected publications

– Kuhlwilm Martin et al. (including Marques-Bonet T) 2016, ‘Ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals’, Nature, 530, 7591, 429.

– de Valles-Ibanez G, Hernandez-Rodriguez J, Prado-Martinez J, Luisi P, Marques-Bonet, T & Casals F 2016, ‘Genetic Load of Loss-of-Function Polymorphic Variants in Great Apes’, Genome Biology and Evolution, 8, 3, 871 – 877.

– Lobon I et al. & Marques-Bonet T 2016, ‘Demographic History of the Genus Pan Inferred from Whole Mitochondrial Genome Reconstructions’, Genome Biology and Evolution, 8, 6, 2020 – 2030.

– de Manuel M, et al. & Marques-Bonet T 2016, ‘Chimpanzee genomic diversity reveals ancient admixture with bonobos’, Science, 354(6311):477-481.

– Kuhlwilm M, de Manuel M, Nater A, Greminger MP, Krützen M & Marques-Bonet T 2016, ‘Evolution and demography of the great apes’, Curr. Opin. Genet. Dev., 41, 124-129.

– Cagan, Alexander et al. (including Marques-Bonet T) 2016, ‘Natural Selection in the Great Apes’, Molecular Biology And Evolution, 33, 12, 3268 – 3283.

– Marsden CD et al. (including Marques-Bonet T) 2016, ‘Bottlenecks and selective sweeps during domestication have increased deleterious genetic variation in dogs’, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 113 (1).

– Fan Z et al. (including Marques-Bonet T) 2016, ‘Worldwide patterns of genomic variation and admixture in gray wolves’, Genome Res., 26, 2, 163 – 173.


Selected research activities

– Vicedirector of the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF).

– Executive Committee of the Genome 10K and Dog 10K genomic consortia.