Bruno Reversade

Bruno Reversade was born in 1974 into a French-American family.

He was raised in Grenoble (France) and Washington, D.C. (US).

Bruno Reversade studied at the University Joseph Fourier, Pierre and Marie Curie University and UCLA.

Bruno Reversade (born 1978) is an American human geneticist and developmental biologist.

He is a Director of the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Genome Institute of Singapore at A*STAR (Singapore) and holds several faculty positions at other universities.

Reversade is known for identifying mutated genes that cause Mendelian diseases, for his research on the genetics of identical twins and for the characterizations of novel hormones.

Reversade became interested in developmental biology in 1997 when studying at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) under the tutelage of Greg Kelly.

He earned his master's degree at the Pasteur Institute (Paris, France), where he studied head development in the mouse embryo.

He then moved to the United States to work at the HHMI laboratory of Edward M. De Robertis at the University of California, Los Angeles.

There he studied the specification of the dorsal-ventral axis during vertebrate development using Xenopus embryos.

In 2005, Reversade and De Robertis detailed how multiple extracellular proteins allow embryos that are cut in two to self-regulate consistently.

In 2005, during his Ph.D. thesis in the laboratory of Edward De Robertis, the scientists published two discoveries, pertaining to the self-regulation of an embryonic morphogenetic field mediated by the extracellular Chordin/BMP/Sizzled pathway.

This helped provide a molecular framework for how embryos split in two halves can develop into perfect, albeit smaller, identical twinned embryos.

Reversade also researches the genetics of dizygotic and monozygotic twinning in humans.

He has been searching for genes responsible for monozygotic (MZ) twinning from rare population isolates.

In 2021, together with the VU Amsterdam, his group revealed that MZ twins harbor an epigenetic signature in their somatic tissue even decades after their birth.

This stable DNA mark could be employed to retrospectively assess if a person is a MZ twin even if his/her co-twin vanished in utero.

Reversade's research has also pioneered the annotation of novel micropeptides.

In 2006, Reversade earned his PhD from the Pierre and Marie Curie University.

In 2008, he received the A*STAR investigatorship (Singapore) award and set up his team in 2008 at the Institute of Medical Biology to carry out human embryology and genetic research.

In 2015, he became a Director at A*STAR.

Also in 2015, he received AAA Fellowship from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and was appointed Professor of Human Genetics at the Centre for Reproductive Medicine at the university's Academic Medical Center.

Since 2016, Reversade is a Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics at Koç University (Turkey).

In 2023, Reversade became a Smart-Health Initiative Director and Professor at KAUST in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Reversade's team works on the genetic characterization and clinical description of inherited conditions in humans.

They have identified mutations responsible for progeroid syndromes in humans, NLRP1 inflammasome-related diseases, self-healing cancers and numerous diseases causing birth defects

Reversade's group has identified the following genes to be responsible for novel Mendelian diseases:

Reversade's investigations in developmental biology have relied on various animal model organisms (C. elegans, Drosophila, zebrafish, Xenopus and transgenic mice) and

covered such embryonic processes as neural induction, limb development, and various human diseases causing birth defects.