CRG researchers Verónica Lloréns and Ben Lehner were acknowledged by the Catalan Society of Biology in the 3rd edition of their annual prizes in the categories of Young Investigator and Best Paper respectively.

Verónica Lloréns, former CRG PhD student and currently postdoctoral researcher at the KU Leuven University, received the Young Investigator Prize, which recognizes the best doctoral thesis in the biology and life sciences fields carried out in the Catalan-speaking territories. She was awarded for her thesis entitled “Integrative understanding of transcription in a minimal cell model”, which was supervised by Luis Serrano and Maria Lluch-Senar from the Design of Biological Systems laboratory at the CRG. In her thesis, Veronica used Mycoplasma pneumoniae as a model system to study the role of transcriptional regulatory elements and to what extent these elements contribute to the observed changes in RNA levels during the experiments.

ICREA research professor and group leader of the Genetic Systems laboratory Ben Lehner received the Best Paper Prize, for his paper “Transgenerational transmission of environmental information in C. elegans”,  recently published in Science.

Two other finalists for this Prize were the ICREA researcher at the IRB Barcelona and former CRG group leader Salvador Aznar Benitah for his Cell paper on circadian rhythm and stem cell reprogramming, and CRG researcher Julien Lagarde for his paper published in Nature Genetics regarding the annotation of full-length long non coding RNAs.

The award ceremony took place during the celebration of the 3rd Night of Biology organized by the Catalan Society of Biology at the Paranymph in the Historic Building of the University of Barcelona. This annual Biology Night aims to gather together scientists and the general public to celebrate the latest scientific advances in biology, carried out within the Catalan-speaking territories.