Jiménez, Benilde / del Peso, Luis

Our group aims to contribute to the understanding of the transcriptional response to hypoxia and angiogenesis as a main adaptive response, to exploit this knowledge to improve clinical management of pathologies in which tissue hypoxia is a common feature. Our current research goals are: (1) Characterization of the transcriptional response to hypoxia. Identification of the molecular mechanisms responsible for gene downregulation during hypoxia and gene regulatory networks involving HIFs. (2) Understanding the role of HIFs in the control of endothelial cell proliferation during angiogenesis induced by hypoxia. (3) Identification of polymorphisms affecting HIF binding sites and characterization of their contribution to disease inter-individual variability in cancer and cardiopulmonary diseases. To achieve these goals we use a combination of experimental and computational approaches and employ a wide array of experimental models including primary cultures of endothelial cells, stem cells and embryoid bodies . We make extensive use of genomic techniques including RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, targeted-genome sequencing and functional genomics, among others.