Novoa Lab

Novoa LabNovoa Lab

Genome Biology

Novoa Lab
Epitranscriptomics and RNA Dynamics
Group leader

Novoa Lab

Epitranscriptomics and RNA Dynamics
Group leader
We are offering a fully-funded PhD position in our lab

2007 - B.Sc. in Biochemistry, University of Barcelona (UB), Barcelona (Spain)
2009 - M.Sc. in Bioinformatics, University Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona (Spain)
2012 - Ph.D. in Biomedicine, Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), Barcelona (Spain)
2013 - EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Boston (USA)
2014 - HSFP Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Boston (USA)
2016 - Group Leader/Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney (Australia)
2018 - Group Leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona (Spain)

*** Visit our lab website here: https://novoalab.com/ *** 

Job Opportunities

Other positions
The Novoa Lab is always interested to hear from potential postdoctoral researchers, PhD students and technicians/bioinformaticians that are interested in joining our lab. Our laboratory is highly multidisciplinary, combining both wet and dry lab approaches, and therefore the recommended backgrounds range from biological sciences (e.g. Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology) to computational sciences (e.g. Computational Biology, Bioinformatics). Prior experience in RNA Biology, Nanopore sequencing or Machine Learning is a plus. If you are excited by our research and would like to join our team, please send an us an email (eva.novoa@crg.eu) with your CV and motivation letter.

News

Antibody design and cancer liquid biopsy research projects backed by ERC (11/07/2024)
Dr. Luis Serrano and Dr. Eva Novoa, researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, have each received a prestigious Proof of Concept (PoC) grant from the European Research Council in the first round of the 2024 competition.

EMBO selects Eva Novoa as new Young Investigator (17/01/2024)
The EMBO Young Investigator Programme is an initiative that supports excellent young group leaders in the early stages of their independent careers.

tRNA biomarkers for cancer diagnosis and prognosis enabled by new method (06/04/2023)
Researchers have developed a new method to measure tRNA abundances and their modifications in a simple, cost-effective manner, publishing their proof-of-concept findings in Nature Biotechnology

Heart toggles between maintenance and energy-boost mode using ribosomes (07/03/2023)
Researchers at the CRG have discovered a mechanism involving ribosomes which helps the heart toggle between a ‘regular maintenance mode’ for day-to-day function and an ‘energy-boost mode’ which aids recovery for high-demand situations including heart attacks.

Researchers at the CRG receive €4.5m to study cancer, reproduction and blood formation (10/01/2022)
Eva Novoa, Group Leader of the Epitranscriptomics and RNA Dynamics lab at the CRG, will study the role of RNA in sperm in passing paternal hereditary information, for example through diet.

Two new grants awarded to the lab (October 2021)
The AECC (Spanish Association Against Cancer), under the LAB AECC 2021 call, has awarded the project “Native RNA nanopore sequencing as a novel technology for rapid cancer screening and monitoring” 300,000 € (role PI). The lab has also been awarded the Merck Innovation Grant H2020, amounting to 900,000 €, to the project “A drug discovery targeting cancer-specific RNA modifying enzimes” (role: co-PI). Both grants will run from 2021 to 2024.

Measuring RNA modifications opens new research avenues for cancer detection (14/05/2021)
Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) have developed a new method to measure the abundance of RNA modifications in much finer detail than previously possible. 

Direct RNA sequencing made applicable to patient-derived samples (09/09/2020)
Researchers have developed a method to detect diverse RNA molecules, such as viral RNAs, in samples with minimal biological material. 

New therapeutic targets for infertility and cancer revealed (08/05/2020)
CRG researchers share the result of the most comprehensive evolutionary analysis of RNA modification proteins to date.

Our Genome Biology paper highlighted in the media (El Diario, 07/05/20: https://www.eldiario.es/sociedad/Descubren-pueden-dianas-terapeuticas-infertilidad_0_1024698012.html)

CRG standardises COVID-19 data analysis to aid international research efforts (27/03/2020)
Researchers from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) have launched a new database to advance the international research efforts studying COVID-19. 

Our efforts to create a SARS-CoV-2 direct RNA sequencing analysis repository have been highlighted in the press (Diari Ara, 27/03/20: https://www.ara.cat/societat/Barcelona-genetiques-coronavirus-covid-19_0_2424357698.html)
Further info related to these efforts can be found here.

Special feature of RNA modification detection methods in Science, including our work in bioRxiv (now published in Nature Comm) (Science, 17/05/2019: https://www.sciencemag.org/features/2019/05/epitranscriptomics-rna-revisited)

Summary

A current major challenge in biology is to understand how gene expression is regulated with surgical precision in a tissue-dependent, spatial and temporal dimension. Historically, genome-wide studies of gene expression have typically measured mRNA abundance rather than protein synthesis, in large part because such data are much easier to obtain. However, the correlation between mRNA levels and protein abundance is as low as r=0.35-0.40, suggesting that transcriptional regulation alone is not sufficient to unveil the complex orchestration of gene expression. In the last few decades, the scientific community has started to acknowledge the pivotal role that post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms play in gene expression, however, we are still far from understanding how gene expression is finely tuned and regulated across tissues and conditions, suggesting that we are missing variables in the equation.

In our lab, we are employing a combination of experimental (RNASeq, polysome profiling, mouse/cell knockouts, Oxford Nanopore direct RNA sequencing) and computational techniques (NGS data analysis, algorithm development, machine learning), to unveil the secrets of three post-transcriptional regulatory layers: the epitranscriptome, RNA structure and ribosome specialization.


(Illustrations adapted from: Novoa et al., Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 2017; Imanishi et al., Chem Communic 2017; Li et al., Nature Methods 2017; Hauenschild et al., Nucl Acids Res 2015; Stoecklin and Diederichs, EMBO J 2014)

Funding Acknowledgements