The Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) was an international centre for biological and biomedical research and graduate training based in Oeiras, Portugal.

A new building alongside the Marquês de Pombal Palace, in Oeiras, was projected to make up the new campus planned with a set of infrastructures including laboratories, library, canteen and animal facility.

From 1966 to 1969, four IGC leaders passed away: Delfim Santos (Pedagogical Innovation), António Gião (Scientific Calculation), Flávio Resende (Biology) and Luís Quartin Graça (Agricultural Economy).

A team led by José Feijó discovered a new function of these proteins, showing that moss sperm uses them to navigate towards the female organs and ensure offspring.

[13] - Moisés Mallo and his research group have discovered the key factor that regulates trunk development in vertebrates and explains why snakes have such a strikingly different body.

These findings published in Developmental Cell in August 2016, contributed to understand the origin of the exceptionally long trunks that characterise the body of snakes and may open new avenues to the study of spinal cord regeneration.

[14][15] - A research team led by Mónica Bettencourt Dias shed light upon the critical mechanism of how oocytes, the maternal gametes, lose centrioles and the importance of doing so for female fertility.

[16] - IGC scientists led by Miguel Godinho Ferreira found that certain organs, such as the gut, start to age before other tissues because its cells have a "timekeeper" with a faster pace.

The results published in the journal PLoS Genetics in January 2016 also showed that monitoring the pace of these timekeepers can be a good indicator for the aging of the whole organism since the appearance of local age-related lesions anticipates the onset of age-associated diseases, such as cancer.

The results published in Cell Reports in October 2015 uncovered how these defects, often associated with cancer development, congenital diseases and infertility, evade the strict surveillance of the checkpoint mechanisms that ensure faithful genome segregation.

These findings were published in the journal PLoS Biology in February 2015, in the first study linking genes and their functions in the Wolbachia bacterium and providing a starting point for the understanding of the widespread insect-Wolbachia symbiosis.

[21] - In a study published in the scientific journal Cell in December 2014, a research team at IGC led by Miguel Soares discovered that specific bacterial components in the human gut microbiota can trigger a natural defence mechanism that is highly protective against malaria transmission.

[26][27] - In August 2013, the research team led by Miguel Godinho Ferreira in collaboration with Isabel Gordo, showed for the first time that chromosomes rearrangements (such as inversions or translocations) can provide advantages to the cells that harbor them depending on the environment they are exposed.

[30] - The IGC has been part of the multinational team of researchers from 10 countries that sequenced the genome of the tiny spider mite in a study published in Nature, in November 2011.

[33] - An international team led by José Feijó published a study in Science, in March 2011, revealing that pollen, the organ that contains the plant male gametes, communicate with the pistil, their female counterpart, using a mechanism commonly observed in the nervous system of animals.

[34] - A research team led by Miguel Soares found that free heme, released from red blood cells during infection, is the cause of organ failure, leading to the lethal outcome of severe sepsis.

[35] - A study published in Nature, in September 2010, by a team of researchers led by Miguel Godinho Ferreira solved a paradox related to telomeres, the protective tips of chromosomes.

The researchers found that one of the histones neighbouring the telomeres lacks a chemical signal, thus rendering the DNA damage recognition machinery incapable of arresting the cell cycle.

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