After studying Biology at the University of Barcelona (UB), I did my doctoral thesis at the Department of Physiology of the School of Medicine of the UB. Articles from the eighties on cancer motivated my interest in this subject and led me to postdoctoral stays in the United States, New York University (New York, NY) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge), MA). I joined the UB as a professor in 1992. I am currently Full Professor of Genetics in the Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics, and member of the Institute of Biomedicine of the UB (IBUB). I coordinate and teach undergraduate and master’s classes and lead the Gene Expression Regulation laboratory within the Developmental Biology and Genomics group (http://www.ub.edu/developmentalbiology/web/). Since 2017 I am the president of the Catalan Society of Biology (SCB), affiliated to the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC).

Research interests

Regeneration is widespread in nature and the capacity to regenerate varies greatly between species, organs, as well as from one developmental stage to another in the same species. My research in recent years focuses on the study of the mechanisms involved in regeneration using Drosophila as a model system. Our main goals are: a) determining the mechanisms of stress response generated after damage; b) identifying the regulatory regions in the context of chromosomal architecture that respond to injury-induced stress. The use of functional genomics approaches has allowed us to analyze how changes in the dynamics of chromatin regulate changes in gene expression necessary for tissue regeneration. We have recently identified regions capable of responding to damage that become active in the presence of specific transcription factors that are shared across organ regeneration in different species, which may have profound implications for our understanding of tissue regeneration.

Keywords

Regeneration, transcription, chromatin, functional genomics, gene regulation