Arcadi Navarro

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Life & Medical Sciences

Arcadi got a PhD in Biology at the UAB. After quitting the academic world for a few years, he went back to basic research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He entered the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in 2002 and was appointed ICREA Research Professor in 2006. Between 2008-13 he was vice-director of the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE), an institute jointly formed by the UPF and the CSIC. Currently he is Professor of Genetics at the UPF, where he leads a research group in Evolutionary Genomics within the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences. He directed that Department between 2013 and 2016, a time during which he also engaged in a collaboration with the CRG to deploy the European Genome-Phenome Archive in Barcelona, with the participation of the EMBL/EBI and the BSC. Right after that, he left ICREA for a while to become Secretary for Universities and Research at the Generalitat de Catalunya. He is happy to be back.


Research interests

Life as we see it in our planet today has been shaped by many different biological processes during billions of years. These processes leave a signature in our genomes in the form of differences between species, or between individuals of the same species. By interrogating these patterns of genome diversity we can infer what are the forces that affect living organisms, how and when they act and how do they affect such various things as biodiversity, ageing or the differential susceptibility of different persons to certain diseases. All this knowledge empowers us to control our future but, above all, it is fun to obtain.

Selected publications

– Muntane G, Farre X, Rodriguez JA, Pegueroles C, Hughes DA, de Magalhaes JP, Gabaldon T & Navarro A 2018, ‘Biological Processes Modulating Longevity across Primates: A Phylogenetic Genome-Phenome Analysis’, Molecular Biology And Evolution, 35, 8, 1990 – 2004.

– Marigorta UK, Rodriguez JA, Gibson G & Navarro A 2018, ‘Replicability and Prediction: Lessons and Challenges from GWAS’, Trends In Genetics, 34, 7, 504 – 517.

– Santpere G, Garcia-Esparcia P, Andres-Benito P, Lorente-Galdos B, Navarro A & Ferrer I 2018, ‘Transcriptional network analysis in frontal cortex in Lewy body diseases with focus on dementia with Lewy bodies’, Brain Pathology, 28, 3, 315 – 333.

– Telford M, Navarro A & Santpere G 2018, ‘Whole genome diversity of inherited chromosomally integrated HHV-6 derived from healthy individuals of diverse geographic origin’, Scientific Reports, 8, 3472.

– Solis-Moruno M, de Manuel M, Hernandez-Rodriguez J, Fontsere C, Gomara-Castano A, Valsera-Naranjo C, Crailsheim D, Navarro A, Llorente M, Riera L, Feliu-Olleta O & Marques-Bonet T 2018, ‘Potential damaging mutation in LRP5 from genome sequencing of the first reported chimpanzee with the Chiari malformation (vol 7, 2017)’, Scientific Reports, 8, 7437.

– Hernandez-Rodriguez J, Arandjelovic M, Lester J, de Filippo C, Weihmann A, Meyer M, Angedakin S, Casals F, Navarro A, Vigilant L, Kuehl HS, Langergraber K, Boesch C, Hughes D & Marques-Bonet T 2018, ‘The impact of endogenous content, replicates and pooling on genome capture from faecal samples’, Molecular Ecology Resources, 18, 2, 319 – 333.