Marc Martí-Renom

Centre de Regulació Genòmica

Life & Medical Sciences

I obtained a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the UAB where I worked on protein folding under the supervision of Professors B. Oliva, F.X. Avilés and M. Karplus (Nobel Laureate in 2013). After that, I went to the US for a postdoctoral training on protein structure modeling at the Sali Lab (Rockefeller University) as the recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund fellowship. Later on, I was appointed Assistant Adjunct Professor at UCSF. Between 2006 and 2011, I headed the Structural Genomics Group at the CIPF in Valencia (Spain). Since October 2013, I am ICREA Research Professor and lead the Genome Biology Group at the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG) and the Structural Genomics Group at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), both in Barcelona. Our group is broadly interested on how RNA, proteins and genomes organize and regulate cell fate. I have published over 90 articles in international peer-reviewed journals with over 10000 citations (Google Scholar indexed).


Research interests

How biomolecules fold and function in a three-dimensional space is one of the most challenging questions in biology. For example, we have limited knowledge on how the 2-meter-long DNA molecule folds in the micro-sized nucleus or how RNA, proteins and small chemical compounds fold and interact to perform their most basic functions of the cell. Our research group employ the laws of physics and the rules of evolution to develop and apply experimental and computational methods for predicting the 3D structures of macromolecules and their complexes.

Selected publications

- Serra F, Bau D, Goodstadt M, Castillo D, Filion G & Marti-Renom MA 2017, 'Automatic analysis and 3D-modelling of Hi-C data using TADbit reveals structural features of the fly chromatin colors', Plos Computational Biology, 13, 7, e1005665.

- Trussart M, Yus E, Martinez S, Bau D, Tahara YO, Pengo T, Widjaja M, Kretschmer S, Swoger J, Djordjevic S, Turnbull L, Whitchurch C, Miyata M, Marti-Renom MA, Lluch-Senar M & Serrano L 2017, 'Defined chromosome structure in the genome-reduced bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae', Nature Communications, 8, 14665.

- Martinez-Jimenez F, Overington JP, Al-Lazikani B & Marti-Renom MA 2017, 'Rational design of non-resistant targeted cancer therapies', Scientific Reports, 7, 46632.

- Cattoni DI, Cardozo Gizzi AM, Georgieva M, Di Stefano M, Valeri A, Chamousset D, Houbron C, Dejardin S, Fiche J-B, GonzalezI , Chang J-M, Sexton T, Marti-Renom MA, Bantignies F, Cavalli G & Nollmann M 2017, 'Single-cell absolute contact probability detection reveals chromosomes are organized by multiple low-frequency yet specific interactions', Nature Communications, 8, 1753.

- Goodstadt M & Marti-Renom MA 2017, 'Challenges for visualizing three-dimensional data in genomic browsers', FEBS Letters, 591 2505–2519   

- Le Dily F, Serra F & Marti-Renom MA 2017, '3D modeling of chromatin structure: is there a way to integrate and reconcile single cell and population experimental data?', Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-computational Molecular Science, 7, 5, e1308.

- Quilez J, Vidal E, Le Dile F, Serra F, Cuartero Y, Stadhouders R, Graf T, Marti-Renom MA, Beato M & Filion G 2017, 'Managing The Analysis Of High-Throughput Sequencing Data', GigaSciences, 6 1-6  

Selected research activities

Since 2016, I coordinate efforts within the 4DNucleome Initiative in Europe (http://www.4dnucleome.eu).

During 2017 I continued serving as Treasurer of the Catalan Society of Biology, Associate Editor of PLOS Computational Biology and Editor of BMC Structural Biology.