Luis Serrano

Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)

Life & Medical Sciences

I did my PhD at the CBM in Madrid on the role of the carboxy-terminal region of tubulin on polymerization and MAP binding. Then I moved to the UK to work on protein folding. In 1993 I moved to the EMBL as a GL and started a new activity related to Protein design. After 6 years I was promoted to Senior Scientist. 2 years later I was appointed head of the Structural & Computational Biology programme. At that time we moved into the field of protein misfolding and amyloidoses diseases. We also started a new area of research on Systems Biology, designing small gene networks, doing computer simulations on them and performing experiments to test the predictions. After 14 years at the EMBL I moved to Spain to lead a programme working on Systems Biology. I was appointed vice-director before finally becoming the CRG director in July 2011. My group is focused on Synthetic Biology, engineering and designing of biological systems using our knowledge on protein design and gene networks.


Research interests

The group of Luis Serrano is interested in the quantitative understanding and in the rational design of Biological Systems. To achieve this goal they combine theoretical and experimental approaches and develop appropriate software. Of particular interest for the group is the combination of protein design and network analysis to understand signal transduction and gene regulation. As a more ambitious project the group is part of a consortium with the EMBL in Heidelberg aiming at obtaining for the first time a global quantitative understanding of a living system, Mycoplasma pneumonia.

Selected publications

– Hernández J, Bechara E, Schlesinger D, Delgado J, Serrano L & Valcárcel J 2016, ‘Tumor suppressor properties of the splicing regulatory factor RBM10’, Rna Biology, 13, 4, 466 – 472.

– Kiel C, Benisty H, Llorens-Rico V & Serrano L 2016, ‘The yin-yang of kinase activation and unfolding explains the peculiarity of VaI600 in the activation segment of BRAF’, Elife, 5, e12841.

– Llorens-Rico et al 2016, ‘Bacterial antisense RNAs are mainly the product of transcriptional noise’, Science Adv. 2:e1501363.

– Schaefer MH & Serrano L 2016, ‘Cell type-specific properties and environment shape tissue specificity of cancer genes’, Scientific Reports, 6, 20707.

– Chen W-H, van Noort V, Lluch-Senar M, Hennrich ML, Wodke JAH, Yus E, Alibes A, Roma G, Mende DR, Pesavento C, Typas A, Gavin A-C, Serrano L & Bork P 2016, ‘Integration of multi-omics data of a genome-reduced bacterium: Prevalence of post-transcriptional regulation and its correlation with protein abundances’, Nucleic Acids Research, 44, 3, 1192 – 1202.

– Lluch-Senar M, Mancuso FM, Climente-Gonzalez H, Pena-Paz MI, Sabido E & Serrano L 2016, ‘Rescuing discarded spectra: Full comprehensive analysis of a minimal proteome’, Proteomics, 16, 4, 554 – 563.