Tomàs Marquès Bonet is a biologist and directs the Comparative Genomics Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), mainly dedicated to analysing and comparing the genome of primates in order to try to better understand the human genome.
Human enhancement through genome editing is one of the goals of transhumanism, but its implementation might generate important discriminations.
Knowing the detailed genomes of viruses and their phylogenies allows us to understand the origin of the outbreak. Was it a zoonosis from bats or were other hosts involved? Where did this fatal transition occur? What is the rate of change of the virus?
This monograph analyses the possibility of cultivating plants outside our planet Earth; presents advances in genome editing such as those that have allowed my laboratory to obtain seedless tomatoes; assesses strategies that should lead to more plentiful harvests using fewer resources; and explains biotechnological strategies to strengthen plants’ immune systems or to use them as biofactories in which we can harvest molecules of health or nutrition interest. Will that be enough? Will we make it in time?
Technological advances in the study of our genome now allow us to infer whose remains have been found, for example, at a mass grave or an anonymous tomb, and to extrapolate where they lived, their physical appearance, or their family origin.
Comparing the role FOXP2 plays in humans and other animals is starting to reveal common principles that may have provided building blocks for language evolution.
Studying the genetic diversity of human populations today reveals past demographic and migratory events that left an imprint on our genome, same as current migrations will affect our future genetic diversity.
The genome and the complexity of living beings. The genome of an organism is the whole DNA content of its cells, including genes and intergenic regions. In prokaryotes (Archaea and Bacteria) there is, in general, a linear relationship between genome size and the number of
- 1
- 2