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Guillaume Bourque

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Guillaume Bourque

Professor, Department of Human Genetics

Email: guil.bourque@mcgill.ca
Phone: (514) 398-8602
Fax: (514) 398-1790

740 Dr Penfield Ave, Room 6103
Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3A 1A4

Website

Dr. Bourque joined McGill University in 2010 and is a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics and the Director of Bioinformatics at the McGill Genome Center. During his PhD, he worked on genome rearrangements in evolution with Pavel Pevzner at the University of Southern California. From 2004 to 2010, he worked at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where he was a Senior Group Leader and the Associate Director of Computational & Mathematical Biology. Dr. Bourque leads the Canadian Center for Computational Genomics (C3G), a Genome Canada bioinformatics platform, and the McGill initiative in Computational Medicine (MiCM). He is also the head of the Epigenomics Mapping Center at McGill, a project that oversees data generation and processing as part of the Canadian Epigenetics, Environment and Health Research Consortium (CEEHRC), which is associated with the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC). He is also the chair of the Integrative Analysis working group of IHEC.

Dr. Bourque is a member of the Advisory Board of CIHR’s Institute of Genetics and is on the External Consultant Panel of the US-funded Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project. He is also on the Steering Committee of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) since two of his projects, CanDIG and EpiShare, have been selected as Driver Projects by the organization. Dr. Bourque is also on the Research Advisory Council of Compute Canada, the national platform for high-performance computing, and of CANARIE, responsible for Canada’s ultra-fast network backbone. In 2019, his leadership in Digital Research Infrastructure was recognized and he was named as one of the 4 Directors of the Applicant Board of the new organization that will coordinate these efforts for Canada. This new organization is funded by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), with a budget of 375 M$ over the next 5 years, to deploy and coordinate a national infrastructure (covering high-performance computing, software and data management) that will support all areas of research.

Research Interests

The goal of the Bourque lab is to understand mammalian genomes using comparative genomic and epigenomic analyses. Areas of interest include: the evolution of regulatory sequences, the role of transposable elements in gene regulation and the impact of genome rearrangements in evolution and cancer. Work in the lab involves examining the billions of DNA base pairs and interpreting how variation impacts basic biology and disease. One objective is to develop computational methods and resources for the functional annotation of genomes with a special emphasis on sequencing-based assays (e.g. ChIP-seq, RNA-Seq, exome- and whole-genome sequencing, single-cell analysis). Dr. Bourque is also in an ideal position to contribute and drive large health initiatives that have a strong genomic and bioinformatics component. His lab develops advanced tools and scalable computational infrastructure to enable large-scale applied research projects.

Recent Publications

  • Lammi, V, Nakanishi, T, Jones, SE, Andrews, SJ, Karjalainen, J, Cortés, B et al.. Genome-wide association study of long COVID. Nat Genet. 2025;57 (6):1402-1417. doi: 10.1038/s41588-025-02100-w. PubMed PMID:40399555 PubMed Central PMC12165857.
  • Terry Fox Research Institute Marathon of Hope Cancer Centers Network. Electronic address: mmarra@bcgsc.ca, Terry Fox Research Institute Marathon of Hope Cancer Centers Network. The Terry Fox Research Institute Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network: A pan-Canadian precision oncology initiative. Cancer Cell. 2025;43 (4):587-592. doi: 10.1016/j.ccell.2025.03.014. PubMed PMID:40185094 .
  • Zhuang, QK, Bauermeister, K, Galvez, JH, Alogayil, N, Batdorj, E, de Villena, FPM et al.. Survey of gene, lncRNA and transposon transcription patterns in four mouse organs highlights shared and organ-specific sex-biased regulation. Genome Biol. 2025;26 (1):74. doi: 10.1186/s13059-025-03547-0. PubMed PMID:40140847 PubMed Central PMC11948892.
  • Groza, C, Ge, B, Cheung, WA, Pastinen, T, Bourque, G. Expanded methylome and quantitative trait loci detection by long-read profiling of personal DNA. Genome Res. 2025;35 (4):644-652. doi: 10.1101/gr.279240.124. PubMed PMID:40113263 PubMed Central PMC12047246.
  • Elder, E, Lemieux, A, Legault, LM, Caron, M, Bertrand-Lehouillier, V, Dupas, T et al.. Rescuing DNMT1 fails to fully reverse the molecular and functional repercussions of its loss in mouse embryonic stem cells. Nucleic Acids Res. 2025;53 (4):. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaf130. PubMed PMID:39997223 PubMed Central PMC11851107.
  • Brial, F, Le Lay, A, Rouch, C, Henrion, E, Bourgey, M, Bourque, G et al.. Transcriptome atlases of rat brain regions and their adaptation to diabetes resolution following gastrectomy in the Goto-Kakizaki rat. Mol Brain. 2025;18 (1):9. doi: 10.1186/s13041-025-01176-z. PubMed PMID:39920851 PubMed Central PMC11806591.
  • Groza, C, Chen, X, Wheeler, TJ, Bourque, G, Goubert, C. A unified framework to analyze transposable element insertion polymorphisms using graph genomes. Nat Commun. 2024;15 (1):8915. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-53294-2. PubMed PMID:39414821 PubMed Central PMC11484939.
  • Gill, EE, Jia, B, Murall, CL, Poujol, R, Anwar, MZ, John, NS et al.. The Canadian VirusSeq Data Portal and Duotang: open resources for SARS-CoV-2 viral sequences and genomic epidemiology. Microb Genom. 2024;10 (10):. doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.001293. PubMed PMID:39401061 PubMed Central PMC11472881.
  • Johnston, MJ, Lee, JJY, Hu, B, Nikolic, A, Hasheminasabgorji, E, Baguette, A et al.. TULIPs decorate the three-dimensional genome of PFA ependymoma. Cell. 2024;187 (18):4926-4945.e22. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.06.023. PubMed PMID:38986619 .
  • Gill, EE, Jia, B, Murall, CL, Poujol, R, Anwar, MZ, John, NS et al.. The Canadian VirusSeq Data Portal & Duotang: open resources for SARS-CoV-2 viral sequences and genomic epidemiology. ArXiv. 2024; :. . PubMed PMID:38764594 PubMed Central PMC11100916.
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