Ben Lehner

Centre de Regulació Genòmica

Life & Medical Sciences

* 2017 - Acting Coordinator, CRG Systems Biology Program
* 2017 - EMBO Member
* 2014 - Senior Group Leader, CRG
* 2014-17 - AXA Chair in risk prediction in age-related diseases, CRG 
* 2010 - EMBO Young Investigator
* 2009 - ICREA Research Professor
* 2007 - ICREA Junior Researcher
* 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

Many 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? How do mutations combine together to alter phenotypes?  Why is this and how can this be predicted? How and why do mutation rates vary across the genome?  How does the physiology and environment of one generation influence subsequent generations? How do chance events influence the characteristics of individuals?  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 and we choose model systems and approaches to best answer the question at hand, particularly model organisms where we can perform large-scale and highly quantitative genetic analysis. In short, we aim to identify, understand and predict how genetic variation occurs and when it results in phenotypic variation, both at the level of the typical outcome in a population and also in each particular individual.

Selected publications

- Supek F & Lehner B 2017, 'Clustered Mutation Signatures Reveal that Error-Prone DNA Repair Targets Mutations to Active Genes', Cell, 170, 3, 534.

- Klosin A, Casas E, Hidalgo-Carcedo C, Vavouri T & Lehner B 2017, 'Transgenerational transmission of environmental information in C. elegans', Science, 356(6335):320-323.

- Klosin A, Reis K, Hidalgo-Carcedo C, Casas E, Vavouri T & Lehner B 2017, 'Impaired DNA replication derepresses chromatin and generates a transgenerationally inherited epigenetic memory', Science Advances, 3(8):e1701143.

- Stevens TJ, Lando D, Basu S, Atkinson LP, Cao Y, Lee SF, Leeb M, Wohlfahrt KJ, Boucher W, O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan A, Cramard J, Faure AJ, Ralser M, Blanco E, Morey L, Sansó M, Palayret MG, Lehner B, Di Croce L, Wutz A, Hendrich B, Klenerman D & Laue ED 2017, '3D structures of individual mammalian genomes studied by single-cell Hi-C', Nature, 544(7648):59-64. 

- Perez MF, Francesconi M, Hidalgo-Carcedo C & Lehner B 2017, 'Maternal age generates phenotypic variation in Caenorhabditis elegans', Nature, 552, 106–109.

- Faure AJ, Schmiedel JM & Lehner B 2017, 'Systematic Analysis of the Determinants of Gene Expression Noise in Embryonic Stem Cells', Cell Systems, 5(5):471-484.e4. 


Selected research activities

Co-organizer: CSHL Systems Biology: Networks Meeting

Co-organizer: Courses@CRG C. elegans practical course 

Scientific advisory boards: Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon LBMC, Integrative Biology Program, MRC-LMS Integrative Biology Program

Institute review panels: MRC Human Genetics Unit, EMBL-EBI