Tomàs Marquès-Bonet

Tomàs Marquès-Bonet

Universitat Pompeu Fabra & Centre de Regulació Genòmica

Life & Medical Sciences

Dr. Marquès-Bonet is the Principal Investigator of the group "Comparative Genomics" and director of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE; UPF/CSIC) and at the CRG-CNAG. He started his own lab in 2010 with an ERC Starting Grant and was selected as ICREA in 2011. In 2013 he was selected for the EMBO young Investigator award. Starting on 2017 he is an HHMI International young investigator. He has been part of many genome consortia, leading the section of duplications and structural variation in most of them.  His group aims to characterize human specific genomics features, including the evolution of epigenetics in humans or the impact of CNVs in phenotypic traits. With a total of more than 120 peer-reviewed publications, he has published as a senior authorship in Science (2016), Nature (2013;2019), Genome Research (2015), Plos Genetics (2013,2015) among others. He was awarded with an ERC Consolidator 2019.


Research interests

What makes us human? This is a fundamental question in many disciplines. Our team analyzes a wide range of genome variants to determine processes, variants and molecular features that are intrinsic to our species. To do so, we study full genome, epigenomes and transcriptomic sequences of humans and great apes for a better understanding of human specific features.

Selected publications

– Fontsere C, de Manuel M, Marques-Bonet T, Kuhlwilm M 2019, ‘Admixture in Mammals and How to Understand Its Functional Implications On the Abundance of Gene Flow in Mammalian Species, Its Impact on the Genome, and Roads into a Functional Understanding’, Bioessays, 41, 12, 1900123.

– Kuderna LFK, Lizano E, Julia E, Gomez-Garrido J, Serres-Armero A, Kuhlwilm M, Antoni Alandes, Alvarez-Estape M, Juan D, Simon H, Alioto T, Gut M, Gut I, Schierup MH, Fornas O & Marques-Bonet T 2019, ‘Selective single molecule sequencing and assembly of a human Y chromosome of African origin’, Nature Communications, 10, 4.

– Welker F, Ramos-Madrigal J, Kuhlwilm M et al 2019, ‘Enamel proteome shows that Gigantopithecus was an early diverging pongine’, Nature 576, 262–265.

– van der Valk T, Diez-del-Molino D, Marques-Bonet T, Guschanski K & Dalen L 2019, ‘Historical Genomes Reveal the Genomic Consequences of Recent Population Decline in Eastern Gorillas’, Current Biology, 29, 1, 165 – +.

– Gokhman D, Mishol N, de Manuel M, de Juan D, Shuqrun J, Meshorer E, Marques-Bonet T, Rak Y & Carmel L 2019, “Reconstructing Denisovan Anatomy Using DNA Methylation Maps”, Cell 179 (1), 180-192. e10

– Fages A et al. 2019, ‘Tracking Five Millennia of Horse Management with Extensive Ancient Genome Time Series.’, Cell, 177, 6, 1419+-.

– Kuhlwilm M, Han S, Sousa VC, Excoffier L & Marques-Bonet T 2019, ‘Ancient admixture from an extinct ape lineage into bonobos’, Nature Ecology & Evolution, 3, 6, 957 – 965.

– Han S, Andres AM, Marques-Bonet T & Kuhlwilm M 2019, ‘Genetic Variation in Pan Species Is Shaped by Demographic History and Harbors Lineage-Specific Functions’, Genome Biology And Evolution, 11, 4, 1178 – 1191.