For some time, a team of researchers from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE UPF-CSIC), led by Salvador Carranza, arguably the leading expert on reptiles and amphibians in Catalonia, had wanted to obtain the genome of one of the most endangered species in the country. Iberolacerta aurelioiThe Pyrenean lizard, an endemic species of the Pyrenees, is both a window into the glacial past and the evolution of mountain vertebrates. This small reptile, which inhabits only a very restricted area of three mountain ranges in Pallars Sobirà, southern France, and northwestern Andorra, was discovered in the late 1990s at Lake Sotllo, on the peak opposite. Its history—how it had managed to survive in the high mountains and why its habitat was so limited—was unknown. It was also unknown how climate change affected it or what other threats it faced.

There are still elements to map on our genes. More than twenty years ago, the scientific community managed to draw a first draft of the human genome, which was very promising, but also incomplete, since there were many DNA fragments that were missing, unidentifiable, or duplicated. In recent decades, researchers have worked to finish deciphering our instruction book (the genome tells cells what functions they should perform), and in 2003, 92% of the DNA in every cell in our body was published. Now, all efforts are directed at unmasking that 8% of material, and an international team, including the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, has managed to go a step further: it has doubled the number of genetic variations known to date.

Evolution is a slow and gradual process through which species accumulate small changes over time, and only the individuals best adapted to a specific environment are able to survive and pass on their genetics to future generations. This is the theory developed by Charles Darwin in 1859. But the British naturalist could not explain why there are no fossil records of those intermediate forms that allow us to see the gradual evolution of species. This scarcity of samples led paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge to propose that species do not change slowly, but rather remain stable for millions of years and suddenly make brief and radical evolutionary leaps. This is known as the theory of punctuated equilibrium, and now a study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) has reached conclusions that support it and, therefore, challenge the Darwinian system.

A team including the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) has launched a revolutionary project to exploit human genome data with artificial intelligence. The project is part of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a global public-private consortium made up of seven universities and nine pharmaceutical companies. The goal is to facilitate the discovery of the function of many of the proteins in the genome and thus accelerate the discovery of new drugs for diseases that still do not provide treatment.

As a young man, he was passionate about Ancient Egypt, and his insatiable curiosity about the past eventually made him one of the fathers of paleogenetics, a discipline that studies human evolution through ancient DNA preserved in fossils. Biologist and geneticist Svante Pääbo (Stockholm, 1955) won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine for having deciphered the genome of Neanderthals, a species extinct 30,000 years ago, a milestone that opened the door to research into the foundations of our genetic makeup. The researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology is in Barcelona this Monday to receive the fifth European Hypatia Science Prize, awarded by Barcelona City Council and the BCN Knowledge Hub of the European Academy.