Prof. Tomas Marques-Bonet
Although human genome diversity has been the subject of extensive research in the last 30 years, the diversity of great apes has been much less explored. We set out to understand the full spectrum of genetic diversity from single nucleotide to large structural variation using high-coverage next-generation sequencing of a diverse sample of 80 great apes. The set includes wild-born/unrelated specimens from all major subspecies. We found that chimpanzee subspecies are divided in two main clades and show the most complex population history with heterozygosities ranging from approximately equal to twice that of humans. We show that structural variation and loss of function mutations have been accumulated at different rates in different lineages in the great ape and human phylogeny. These data provide a rich resource to understand the biology of great apes, reconstruct their population history and improve conservation efforts for these remarkable species.
Tomas Marques Bonet got his Biology Degree at the University of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) in the specialization of Zoology and Ecology. His research career started with ecology of bats and amphibians, and after a 3 year period outside of the research (working in IBM), he got his PhD at the University Pompeu Fabra (Spain) in 2006 working on the impact of chromosomal rearrangements on molecular evolution on primates. During his postdoctoral research at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA), under the direction of Dr. Evan E. Eichler with a Marie Curie fellowship from the European Union, he followed his research on non-human primate genomics and became interested on the evolution of the primate genomes. Thanks to many collaborations he is participating now in the Consortiums for the genome sequence of Neandertal, Denisovan, Bonobo, Gorila, Gibbon, Orangutan and Marmoset. In 2010, he got the competitive ERC Starting grant and started his own group, formed by 8 people now. Since then, he published 12 papers (3 of them as a senior author) being the most relevant the Nature paper about the diversity in great ape populations.