Gene prediction, genome annotation, comparative genomics ​

A long standing interest in our group is the development of methods to identify genes and other functional elements in genomes.

We have developed computational (geneid, sgp) and experimental (Capture Long Seq) methods to accurately predict genes, to visualize annotations (gff2ps, ggsashimi), and we have introduced widely accepted standards for the evaluation of gene finding methods.

Our group has organized landmark community experiments to benchmark alternative approaches to gene finding and annotation (EGASP, RGASP). We are currently part of the organizing committee of LRGASP. We led the initial phase of GENCODE, the project to produce the reference gene and transcript annotation of the human and mouse genomes, and we are still part of the project, where we lead the experimental verification component. We have participated in many genome projects, including the human, and we are currently leading the Catalan Initiative for the Earth Biogenome Project, the project that aims to sequence the 1.5 million eukaryotic species living on Earth.