Ben Lehner

Ben Lehner

Centre de Regulació Genòmica

Life & Medical Sciences

* 2018 - Coordinator of 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

– Schmiedel JM & Lehner B 2019, ‘Determining protein structures using deep mutagenesis’, Nature Genetics, 51, 7, 1177 – +.

– Schmiedel JM, Carey LB & Lehner B 2019, ‘Empirical mean-noise fitness landscapes reveal the fitness impact of gene expression noise’, Nature Communications, 10, 3180.

– Li X, Lalic J, Baeza-Centurion P, Dhar R & Lehner B 2019, ‘Changes in gene expression predictably shift and switch genetic interactions (vol 10, 3886, 2019)’, Nature Communications, 10, 4319.

– Domingo J, Baeza-Centurion P & Lehner B 2019, ‘The Causes and Consequences of Genetic Interactions (Epistasis)’, Annual Review Of Genomics And Human Genetics, Vol 20, 2019, 20, 433 – 460.

– Bolognesi B, Faure AJ, Seuma M, Schmiedel JM, Tartaglia GG & Lehner B 2019, ‘The mutational landscape of a prion-like domain’, Nature Communications, 10, 4162.

– Lindeboom RGH, Vermeulen M, Lehner B & Supek F 2019, ‘The impact of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay on genetic disease, gene editing and cancer immunotherapy’, Nature Genetics, 51, 11, 1645 – +.

– Baeza-Centurion P, Minana B, Schmiedel JM, Valcarcel J & Lehner B 2019, ‘Combinatorial Genetics Reveals a Scaling Law for the Effects of Mutations on Splicing’, Cell, 176, 3, 549 – +.

– Dhar R, Missarova AM, Lehner B & Carey LB 2019, ‘Single cell functional genomics reveals the importance of mitochondria in cell-to-cell phenotypic variation’, Elife, 8, e38904.

– Francesconi M, Di Stefano B, Berenguer C, de Andres-Aguayo L, Plana-Carmona M, Mendez-Lago M, Guillaumet-Adkins A, Rodriguez-Esteban G, Gut M, Gut I, Heyn H, Lehner B & Graf T 2019, ‘Single cell RNA-seq identifies the origins of heterogeneity in efficient cell transdifferentiation and reprogramming’, Elife, 8, e41627.