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Lluis Quintana-Murci, a Director of Research of the CNRS, heads the Unit of Human Evolutionary Genetics at the Institut Pasteur (Paris) since 2007. He graduated in Biology at the University of Barcelona (Spain), and obtained his Ph.D. in population genetics at the University of Pavia (Italy).
The Quintana-Murci laboratory is focused on understanding how natural selection, human demography and lifestyle have shaped the patterns of diversity of the human genome. Their current projects aim to to increase our understanding of (i) the genetic architecture of human populations, migrations patterns and admixture events; (ii) the occurrence of positive selection in the human genome and the relationship between population demography and the burden of deleterious alleles; (iii) the genetic and epigenetic determinants of immunity-related traits, with an emphasis on molecular phenotypes such as gene and miRNA expression; and (iv) the relationship between genetic diversity, epigenetic patterns (in particular DNA methylation) and changes in lifestyle and habitat of human populations. To this end, his laboratory combines population genetics and cellular genomic approaches, with computational modelling and development of new statistical frameworks, often working closely to theoretical population geneticists, immunologists, epidemiological geneticists as well as anthropologists.
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