Prof Arnau Sebé-Pedrós

Associate Faculty and ICREA Professor at the Centre for Genomic Regulation

I am interested in the evolution of genome function, including mechanisms of gene regulation, comparative chromatin biology, and the study of cell type programs across the tree of life.

I am fascinated by one of biology’s most fundamental questions: how does a single genome encode the diverse cell types in a multicellular organism? How have the mechanisms and regulatory networks that determine cell identity evolved and how diverse are they? How did the gene regulation mechanisms that support cell differentiation and long-term cellular memory arise?

To explore these foundations of complex life, my team and I are studying genome regulation and its evolution in species drawn from across the tree of life. By combining single-cell genomic technologies with high-throughput chromatin profiling and cutting-edge computational methods, we seek to discover:

• The regulatory innovations that led to emergence of stable cell differentiation
• How cell type identity programs evolved and the cellular innovations that resulted from these genetic changes
• The evolutionary relationships between major animal cell types

My timeline

• Associate Faculty, Tree of Life Programme, Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK

• ICREA Research Professor (2023-present)

• Elected EMBO Young Investigator

• ERC Starting Grant (2020-2024)

• Group Leader, Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Spain. (2019-present)

• EMBO Postdoctoral fellow, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. (2015-2019)

• Research associate, Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), Spain. (2013-2014)

• PhD in Genetics. University of Barcelona, Spain. (2009-2013)

• M.Sc. in Developmental Biology and Genetics. University of Barcelona, Spain. (2008-2009)

• B.Sc. in Biological sciences. University of Barcelona, Spain. (2004-2008)