简介
Dr. Francesc Piferrer is Research Professor at the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) in Barcelona, where he served as deputy-director of knowledge transfer between 2022 and 2024. He has worked on fish sex determination/differentiation, fish sexual systems and in developmental and environmental epigenetics. He is the author of over 160 publications that have been cited about 15,000 times (h-index 64; Google Scholar), being among the top 2% of most cited scientists in the world according to Stanford University. He has co-edited the books “Sex Control in Aquaculture” and “Epigenetics in Aquaculture” (Wiley). He is currently involved in the development of epigenetic biomarkers for application to aquaculture, fisheries and conservation biology. In 2013 he received the Jacumar prize for best research in aquaculture. In 2019 he became member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, and in 2020 he received the College of Biologists award for research on fish reproduction and epigenetics.
Scientific contributions:
1. Sex determination and sex differentiation in fish, and sex control in aquaculture
Francesc Piferrer has made important contributions to the study of sex determination and differentiation in fish. In 1994 he provided the first evidence that aromatase was essential for ovarian differentiation since its inhibition turned chromosomally female salmon into fertile male fish. In 2008 he clarified the sex ratio response patterns to elevated temperature and warned about the possible effects of climate change. In 2017 his group discovered heat-exposed zebrafish females with normal ovaries but expressing a male-like transcriptome. This indicated major reprogramming, neglected the well-known “function follows form” relationship, and constituted a novel example of the great sexual plasticity in fish. His studies have been used to develop sex and ploidy control protocols in aquaculture. In 2019 he co-edited the 41-chapter, 2-volume, 888-page book “Sex Control in Aquaculture” (Wiley), considered by BookAuthority “one of the best aquaculture books of all time”.
2. Large-scale studies on the evolution of sexual systems in fish
Piferrer’s lab has compiled a database on the sexual systems (separate sexes or gonochorism, and different forms of hermaphroditism) and key life history traits —longevity, age and size at first maturity, and sperm competition— of more than 4600 fish species. He has studied the incidence, distribution and evolutionary transitions among these sexual systems, showing that gonochorism, and not hermaphroditism, as previously thought, is likely the ancestral sexual system. This crucial data is part of the Tree of Sex database and is now being used to update FishBase and will be integrated in AquaGRIS, FAO’s global system for Aquatic Genetic Resources.
3. Environmental epigenetics: sex regulation, domestication, epigenetic clocks, biomarkers
In 2011 his lab found an epigenetic link between temperature and sex ratios in the sea bass, the first evidence of this type in any animal. This set the course for research in other vertebrates with temperature-dependent sex determination, notably reptiles. Nowadays, the role of epigenetics in sexual development is a very active area of research. Dr. Piferrer postulated the model of the Conserved Epigenetic Regulation of Sex (CERS), which has been demonstrated now to apply to both gonochoristic and sequential hermaphrodites. In the last years, he has focused on the study of internal and external influences on the establishment of epigenetic marks, having developed the world’s first epigenetic sex predictor as well as the first epigenetic clock to estimate age in fish, a molecular alternative to traditional otolith analysis. He has also shown the key role of epigenetic modifications during the initial stages of animal domestication, contributing to a better understanding of Darwin’s “domestication syndrome”. His lab also showed that the first intron, more than the promoter or any other genomic region, exhibited the tightest association between DNA methylation and gene expression. This observation, first made in fish muscle, was extended to other tissues and species across vertebrates including humans, a finding now also used to interpret data in biomedical epigenetics. Thus, not only he has made important discoveries in fish reproduction, but some of these have found applications to other fields. Currently, is interested in epigenetics of early development, the characterization of epi-marks and how animals adapt to a changing environment. He leads the integration of epigenetic selection into fish farming and is the editor the first book on Epigenetics in Aquaculture (published by Wiley in 2023).
