Last December, the European Research Council announced the researchers who had been awarded the prestigious Consolidator Grants, and two of them are working at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB): Miki Ebisuya, from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory – Barcelona (EMBL Barcelona), and Manuel Irimia, from Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG).
More than 2,500 applications were received and only 327 were selected to receive the funding (2 million euros over the next five years); two of them went to PRBB centers.
Through this consolidation grant, Miki Ebisuya’s group will be able to delve into research on the biochemical mechanisms that control the different speed with which embryos from different mammalian species develop, an effect known as developmental allochrony.
“With the ERC Consolidator Grant, additional group members will be working on the topic, and we will be able to expand our experimental toolkit,”
Miki Ebisuya, EMBL Barcelona
On the other hand, Manuel Irimia’s group has received the grant thanks to the NESTEDMICS project, which will develop computational approaches and experiments using in vitro and in vivo systems to investigate how microexons are regulated, with potential implications for human diseases such as diabetes and neurodevelopmental disorders.
