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Luciano Di Croce

Luciano Di Croce

Centre de Regulació Genòmica

Life & Medical Sciences

1996 PhD Dept. Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Rome, Italy. 1996-2000 Postdoctoral work at the University of Marburg, Germany. 2000-2002 Senior Investigator at the European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy. 2003 Group Leader at the Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG), Barcelona, Spain. Research Professor, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA). 2013 Elected EMBO Member. Luciano Di Croce is the coordinator of a new Marie Curie ITN project entitled “Chromatin architecture and Design – ChromDesign” (GA 813327) granted by the European Commission’s H2020-MSCA-ITN-2018 program.


Research interests

Epigenetic changes, such as histone modifications and DNA methylation, are common alterations in cancer cells. Our laboratory is addressing the molecular basis of epigenetic alterations during the early phase of the tumorigenesis process. The expression of onco-proteins in hematopoietic precursor cells provides a unique model system to follow the molecular step from a normal to a transformed cell on the level of gene transcription, nuclear structure and chromatin. More recently, Di Croce lab is interested in understanding how variations in the assembly of the Polycomb complexes occur and influence mES cell differentiation and animal development, and th erole of ‘oncohistone’ in pediatric cancers.

Selected publications

– Alcalá-Vida R, Garcia-Forn M, … Peiró S, Di Croce L, Narita M, Pérez-Navarro E. Neuron type-specific increase in lamin B1 contributes to nuclear dysfunction in Huntington’s disease. EMBO Mol Med. 2021, 13, e121050.

– García-Montolio M, Ballaré C, … Vizán P, Di Croce L.  2021, ‘Polycomb Factor PHF19 Controls Cell Growth and Differentiation Toward Erythroid Pathway in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Cells’, Frontiers In Cell And Developmental Biology, 9, 655201.

– García-Pérez R, Esteller-Cucala P, …  Blancher A, Di Croce L, Gómez-Skarmeta JL, Juan D, Marquès-Bonet T 2021, ‘Epigenomic profiling of primate lymphoblastoid cell lines reveals the evolutionary patterns of epigenetic activities in gene regulatory architectures’, Nature Communications, 12, 1, 3116.

– Blanco E, Di Croce L, Aranda S. 2021, ‘Productive visualization of high-throughput sequencing data using the SeqCode open portable platform’, Scientific Reports, 11, 1, 19545.

– González-Ramírez M, … Blanco E, Di Croce L 2021, ‘Differential contribution to gene expression prediction of histone modifications at enhancers or promoters’, PloS Computational Biology, 17, e1009368.

– Sreenivasan K, …  Di Croce L, Relaix F, Redondo JM, Braun T, Serrano AL, Perdiguero E & Muñoz-Cánoves P 2021, ‘CHD4 ensures stem cell lineage fidelity during skeletal muscle regeneration’. 2021 Stem Cell Reports, 16, 2089-2098.

– Blanco E, Di Croce L & Aranda S 2021, ‘SpikChIP: a novel computational methodology to compare multiple ChIP-seq using spike-in chromatin’ NAR Genom Bioinform. 3, 3, lqab064.

– Vizán P, Di Croce L & Aranda S 2021, ‘Functional and Pathological Roles of AHCY’. Front Cell Dev Biol 9, 654344.

Selected research activities

Since 2021: Co-cordinator of the Gene Regulation, Stem Cells and Cancer Programme at CRG

2012-2021: Chair of the Graduate Programme at CRG

Since 2020: Member for Academic Council of Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology – “Dolors Aleu Graduate Center”

2016-2022: ERC Panel Member

Since 2013: Elected EMBO Member

ICREA Memoir 2021