Vote for Dr. Vavouri in the Vanguardia de la Ciencia award
The Catalan newspaper LaVanguardia and the Catalunya-La Pedrera Foundation invite us to choose the best research of the year in Spain. The present edition is the 8th of this award and it is open to popular vote, with Dr. Tanya Vavouri among the candidates. Dr Vavouri is a researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute and the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute.
Together with Dr. Ben Lehner, from the Centre for Genomic Regulation, Dr. Vavouri carried out a project that showed the environment in which an animal lives affects its genome, and that this information is transmitted to the next generations. The selection committee for the award chose this research, together with 7 others, evaluated on its excellence amongst projects lead by Spanish institutions during 2017.
In this project, Lehner and Vavouri, studying C. elegans worms, common in laboratory experiments, revealed that animals are able to retain information about their environmental conditions in their epigenome. Specifically, the worms retained information about temperature changes in the environment for a period of up to 14 generations. This research marks a shift on the classical view of genetics and environment being separated entities, highlighting that nature is much more complex than the frameworks in which we usually describe it.
You can read more about the project and Dr Vavouri's and Dr Lehner's nomination in the following link. The vote is open to everyone, scientist or not, until February 28.