Tomàs Marquès-Bonet

Tomàs Marquès-Bonet

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

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. His group aims to characterize human specific genomics features, including the combination of evolution and conservation genetics. 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

– Kuderna, Lukas F. K.; Esteller-Cucala, Paula; Marques-Bonet, Tomas 2020, ‘Branching out: what omics can tell us about primate evolution’, Current Opinion In Genetics & Development, 62, 65 – 71.

– Sinding MS,  et al. Tomas Marques-Bonet*, Hansen AJ*, Gilbert MTP*. 2020, “Arctic-adapted Dogs Emerged at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition” Science. 368(6498):1495-1499.

– Genereux, Diane P.; Serres, Aitor; et al. Marques-Bonet, Tomas; Lindblad-Toh, Kerstin; Karlsson, Elinor K. 2020, ‘A comparative genomics multitool for scientific discovery and conservation’, Nature, 587, 7833, 240 – +.

– Welker, Frido; et al. Cappellini, Enrico (including Marques-Bonet T) 2020, ‘The dental proteome of Homo antecessor’, Nature, 580, 7802, 235 – +.

– de Manuel, Marc;  et al. Marques-Bonet, Tomas*; Gilbert, M Thomas P* 2020, ‘The evolutionary history of extinct and living lions.’, Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America, 117 (20) 10927-10934.

– Braso-Vives, Marina; et al. Marques-Bonet, Tomas*; Rogers, Jeffrey*; Juan, David* 2020, ‘Copy number variants and fixed duplications among 198 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)’, Plos Genetics, 16, 5, e1008742.