The group approaches the study of Jewish and Islamic societies in their Mediterranean context, focusing on the impact of both religious cultures in their surrounding social and intellectual milieu through the study of their written and material manifestations. Both cultures have kept in distinctive varieties a complex symbiotic relationship including convergences and divergences. This has been partially determined by their physical proximity from the medieval period to this day.

This Group studies links between music and its social environment, placing Hispanic repertory in international contexts, and exploring musicological research in the fields of Digital Humanities, global histories of music, and cultural history.

The Group is devoted to the historical study of medical and scientific practices and knowledge production in urban settings, grounded in the solid tradition of the IMF in the field. Particular attention is paid to: 1. Knowledge and practices produced and enacted in specific spaces: museums, hospitals, etc., 2. Processes in which professional groups (physicians, naturalists) and communities of different sorts (patients, publics) interact. 3. Practices and knowledge using instruments, generating different representation devices (printed texts, maps, graphics). 4.

Cataloging and critical study of music sources, historical study of performance practices, editing and performance practice of Hispanic historical musical heritage, as a cultural value oriented towards social development.

HUMANE starts from a critical positioning towards the models of knowledge prevailing in Social Sciences research and the need to generate a research truly transdisciplinary that goes beyond the limitations of the single academic disciplines and historical trajectories. HUMANE mission is the development of an innovative theoretical-methodological framework for the study of social dynamics in a long-term perspective and within an environmental framework.

Our research focuses on elucidating the factors and mechanisms underlying the life histories and dynamics of populations and communities of freshwater fishes across scales of space and time essentially in streams and rivers . Futher, attempts to highlight the way in which the populations are regulated in both densities and production dynamics in contrasting habitats.

Our group was established in January 2002. We are interested in the origin and conservation of biological diversity. We study the evolution of reproductive strategies and, in particular, the role of post-copulatory sexual selection (sperm competition and cryptic female choice) on male reproductive success. We are interested in how sperm competition has favoured adaptations from the organismal to the molecular level, focusing on mammals and, in particular, on various rodent lineages.

Our research fields are behavioural ecology and conservation biology, and our main current interests are the behavioural and ecological adaptations of strong sexual selection, the evolution of sex ratio, and sexual segregation in species with extreme sexual size dimorphism. We are also interested in knowing the effects of human-induced landscape changes on the behaviour and population dynamics of wild species.

We use the extreme thermophilic bacteria Thermus thermophilus (Tth) as our main laboratory model. Unlike any other extreme thermophile, Tth grows fast at 70 ºC on LB-like medium, forms colonies on plates, and shows a very efficient natural competence system. The greater ability to crystallize of its enzymes compared to their mesophilic counterparts and its ancient phylogenetic origin gives high biological and evolutionary interest to this model.

Streptomyces and yeasts produce a high number of molecules with biotechnological value. We study the expression molecular mechanism of proteins implicated in some of this biosynthetic process, and try to obtain new molecules with possible industrial applicability. During the last years, we have been studying the biosynthetic cluster of the nucleoside antibiotic A201A (ata) from Streptomyces capreolus, and some yeast proteins with glycosyltransferase activity able to produce prebiotic oligosaccharides.