Ben Lehner

Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)

Life & Medical Sciences

* November 2010 - EMBO Young Investigator

* September 2009 - ICREA Research Professor

* October 2007 - ICREA Junior Researcher

* December 2006 - Group Leader, EMBL-CRG Systems Biology Unit, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona

* 2004-06 Postdoctoral Fellow, Fraser Lab, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

* 2004 PhD University of Cambridge

* 2000 BA Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge


Research interests

Most mutations, for example disease causing mutations in humans, are not harmful in all of the individuals who carry them. When do genetic changes result in phenotypic change? When do they not? Why is this? And how can this be predicted? These are the main questions that drive our research, and we use both experimental and computational approaches to address them. Most of our work is hypothesis driven, but we have also used systematic data collection and integration. Our favourite model organisms are C. elegans and budding yeast, where we can perform both large-scale and highly quantitative genetic analysis. In short, we aim to identify, understand and predict when genetic variation results in phenotypic variation, both at the level of the typical outcome in a population and also in each particular individual.

Selected publications

– Julien P, Minana B, Baeza-Centurion P, Valcarcel J & Lehner B 2016, ‘The complete local genotype-phenotype landscape for the alternative splicing of a human exon’, Nature Communications, 7, 11558.

– Jelier R, Kruger A, Swoger J, Zimmermann T & Lehner B 2016 ‘Compensatory Cell Movements Confer Robustness to Mechanical Deformation during Embryonic Development’ Cell Systems, Volume 3, Issue 2, p160–171.

– Bolognesi B, Lorenzo Gotor N, Dhar R, Cirillo D, Baldrighi M, Tartaglia GGLehner B 2016, ‘A Concentration-Dependent Liquid Phase Separation Can Cause Toxicity upon Increased Protein Expression’, Cell Reports, 16, 1, 222 – 231.

– Lindeboom RGH, Supek F & Lehner B 2016, ‘The rules and impact of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay in human cancers’, Nature Genetics, 48, 10, 1112 – 1118.

– Klosin A & Lehner B 2016, ‘Mechanisms, timescales and principles of trans-generational epigenetic inheritance in animals’, Current Opinion in Genetics & Development, 36:41–49.