Entitled “Great ape genome variation now and then: current diversity and genomic relics of extinct primates”, this project seeks to define the ancestral diversity of the great apes either by using the fossil record or by rescuing parts of extinct species by searching genomes of current apes. “This project will help us understand how diversity is formed in species, and further it will shed light on the adaptive effects of hybridization between species,” says Marquès-Bonet.
Marquès-Bonet is one of the 6 Catalan (18 throughout Spain) awarded with a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council in this call. The highly competitive research funding has been granted around 300 top scientists and scholars across Europe. With this support, worth in total €600 million, the new grantees will have a chance to build up their teams and have far-reaching impact on a wide range of topics in physical sciences and engineering, life sciences, as well as social sciences and humanities.
Tomàs Marquès-Bonet (1975) earned his PhD in Biology at UPF in 2007. He is currently director of the IBE and head of the Comparative Genomics group, an ICREA research professor at the UPF, and holds a dual appointment at the National Centre for Genomic Analysis (CNAG-CRG) and the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) since 2018.
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