Partner 9

Short name: CRG

Principal Investigator: Dr Cedric Notredame, Centro de Regulacio Genomica, Barcelona

Host Institution. The Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) is an innovative centre for basic research created in December 2000 by initiative of the former Department of Universities, Research and Information Society (DURSI) of the Catalan Government. The CRG is legally constituted as a non-profit foundation and has the participation from the Catalan Government through the Innovation, Universities and Enterprise Department (DIUE) and the Health Department (DS), as well as from the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC). It is a unique centre in Spain, based in a non-bureaucratic organization research model, whose objective is to promote basic research in biomedicine and, particularly, in the genomics and proteomics areas. Group leaders at the CRG are recruited internationally and receive support from the centre to set up and run their groups. These groups are evaluated by a Scientific Advisory Board of 10 world leaders in the different areas. The result of evaluations conditions the future of the CRG scientists, no matter whether they have open-ended or time-limited contracts. This ensures the mobility and the renewal of the workforce.

Dr Notredame is a group leader in the Bioinformatics and Genomics programme of the CRG. He was trained as a bioinformaticist in the lab of Des Higgins at EMBL (Heidelberg) and later at the EBI-EMBL (Cambridge). He was awarded his PhD in 1997 and then obtained a junior professor position in Marseille University (1999) and in Lausanne University (2000). In 2002 he obtained a junior CNRS scientist position. After 5 years in the lab of Jean Michel Claverie (IGS) he is currently on leave at the CRG (Barcelona) where he is a senior group leader, heading the laboratory of Comparative Bioinformatics in the Bioinformatics and genomics department. His work is focused on the development of multiple sequence alignment methods and the comparison of protein sequences and structures. He has developed and maintained the T-Coffee Multiple sequence alignment Package, one of the most accurate of its kind that has so far received close to 1000 citations. Between 2001 and 2006, he was a consultant for the pharmaceutical industry (Aventis and Sanofi Aventis) providing expertise on the analysis of the human kinome through multiple sequence comparisons.

Selected Publications:

1. Notredame, C., Recent Evolutions of Multiple Sequence Alignment. PLoS Comput Biol, 2007. 3(8): p. e123.

2. Moretti, S., F. Reinier, O. Poirot, F. Armougom, S. Audic, V. Keduas, and C. Notredame, PROTOGENE: turning amino acid alignments into bona fide CDS nucleotide alignments. Nucleic Acids Res, 2006. 34(Web Server issue): p. W600-3.

3. Armougom, F., S. Moretti, V. Keduas, and C. Notredame, The iRMSD: a local measure of sequence alignment accuracy using structural information. Bioinformatics, 2006. 22(14): p. e35-9.

4. Wallace, I.M., O. O'Sullivan, D.G. Higgins, and C. Notredame, M-Coffee: combining multiple sequence alignment methods with T-Coffee. Nucleic Acids Res, 2006. 34(6): p. 1692-9.

5. Notredame, C., D.G. Higgins, and J. Heringa, T-Coffee: A novel method for fast and accurate multiple sequence alignment. J Mol Biol, 2000. 302(1): p. 205-17.