Luis Serrano

Luis Serrano

Centre de Regulació Genòmica

Life & Medical Sciences

I did my PhD at the CBM in Madrid on the role of the carboxy-terminal region of tubulin on polymerization and MAP binding. Then I moved to the UK to work on protein folding. In 1993 I moved to the EMBL as a GL and started a new activity related to Protein design. After 6 years I was promoted to Senior Scientist. 2 years later I was appointed head of the Structural & Computational Biology programme. At that time we moved into the field of protein misfolding and amyloidoses diseases. We also started a new area of research on Systems Biology, designing small gene networks, doing computer simulations on them and performing experiments to test the predictions. After 14 years at the EMBL I moved to Spain to lead a programme working on Systems Biology. I was appointed vice-director before finally becoming the CRG director in July 2011. My group is focused on Synthetic Biology, engineering and designing of biological systems using our knowledge on protein design and gene networks.


Research interests

The group of Luis Serrano is interested in the quantitative understanding and in the rational design of Biological Systems. To achieve this goal they combine theoretical and experimental approaches and develop appropriate software. Of particular interest for the group is the combination of protein design and network analysis to understand signal transduction and gene regulation. As a more ambitious project our group is now using Synthetic biology to engineer Mycoplasma pneumoniae as a living pill for human lung therapy.  We also continue developing the software for protein design ModelX and FoldX, to engineer proteins with immunomodulatory activity.  Finally we are exploting the role of codon usage and codon conservation in oncogenic proteins. 

Selected publications

- Cianferoni D; Radusky L G.; Head S A.; Serrano L; Delgado J. 2020, 'ProteinFishing: a protein complex generator within the ModelX toolsuite', Bioinformatics, 36, 14, 4208 - 4210.

- Miravet-Verde S; Burgos R; Delgado J; Lluch-Senar M; Serrano L 2020, 'FASTQINS and ANUBIS: two bioinformatic tools to explore facts and artifacts in transposon sequencing and essentiality studies', Nucleic Acids Research, 48, 17, e102.

- Delgado Blanco J; Hernandez-Alias X; Cianferoni D; Serrano L 2020, 'In silico mutagenesis of human ACE2 with S protein and translational efficiency explain SARS-CoV-2 infectivity in different species', Plos Computational Biology, 16, 12, e1008450.

- Benisty H; Weber M; Hernandez-Alias X; Schaefer M H; Serrano L 2020,'Mutation bias within oncogene families is related to proliferation-specific codon usage', Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America, 117,48,30848- 30856.

- Burgos R; Weber M; Martinez S; Lluch-Senar M; Serrano L 2020,'Protein quality control and regulated proteolysis in the genome-reduced organism Mycoplasma pneumoniae.'Molecular Systems Biology, 16,12,e9530- e9530.

- Hernandez-Alias X; Benisty H; Schaefer M H.; Serrano L 2020, 'Translational efficiency across healthy and tumor tissues is proliferation-related', Molecular Systems Biology, 16, 3, 16: e9275.

- Weber M; Burgos R; Yus, E; Yang, J; Lluch-Senar M; Serrano L 2020, 'Impact of C-terminal amino acid composition on protein expression in bacteria', Molecular Systems Biology, 16, 5, e9208.

- Pinero-Lambea C; Garcia-Ramallo E; Martinez S; Delgado J; Serrano L; Lluch-Senar, M 2020, 'Mycoplasma pneumoniae Genome Editing Based on Oligo Recombineering and Cas9-Mediated Counterselection', Acs Synthetic Biology, 9, 7, 1693 - 1704.

Selected research activities

Last year as SOMMa Chair.  Scientific founder of the spin-off Pulmobiotics.