Methods to detect hidden diversity
Develop, test, and refine new computational tools and technologies to uncover hidden aspects of biodiversity.
Biography
Personal Pronouns: He/Him
Contact details:
- +44 (0) 1603 450 986
As a Bioinformatician in Anthony Hall’s group, I’m particularly interested in genome assembly and am currently contributing to the Delivering Sustainable Wheat and Decoding Biodiversity Institute Strategic Programmes.
As part of these programmes, I am assembling the genomes of important UK wheat varieties and historical lines from the Watkins bread wheat landrace collection utilising the latest sequencing technologies available at the Earlham Institute such as PacBio, Nanopore and HiC. These high-quality genomes will allow us to identify structural rearrangements and introgressions that underlie important agronomic traits in these lines, and will also contribute to the wheat pangenome and pangenome-related tools for wheat.
I also collaborate with researchers at Rothamsted Research and the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) to generate a genome assembly of Alopecurus aequalis, a problematic agricultural weed, to understand the genetic basis of weediness.
I joined the Earlham Institute in 2010 to generate assemblies of the 42 chromosome arms of hexaploid wheat for the chromosome-based draft sequence within the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium. Since then, I have been involved in several collaborations to generate genome assemblies for important wheat lines from the UK and around the world using our w2rap pipeline.
My first degree was in Chemistry, after which I completed a MSc in Information Technology before working in the commercial software industry for several years.
I received my PhD in Computational Biology from the John Innes Centre in 2010 where I worked on the model grass Brachypodium distachyon and comparative genomics in the grass family.
