Ashleigh Lister

I have been working in the Macaulay Group since 2016. Our group works on all species types and I have worked with human and mouse tissues in the past, but I now specialise on working with plant tissues. 

I have a lot of experience in all our single cell isolation, including FACS, robotic automation and 10X Genomics and in particular the Vizgen Merscope spatial transcriptomics platform workflows. I have a core role in the preparation of histological samples for downstream spatial transcriptomics experiments.

Prior to working in the Macaulay Group, I was part of the Technical Genomics group, preparing and sequencing libraries for customers data generation. 

I have also worked in Graham Moore's group in the John Innes Centre (JIC) Crop Genetics department, working on a wheat mapping project. This project involved high throughput DNA extractions, KASP marker genotyping and wheat growth and crossing. 

Prior to working at JIC, I worked on the Babraham Research Campus in a start-up company called Recombinant Antibody Technology Ltd. This company cloned human monoclonal antibodies into Rats for therapeutics. In this company, I learned a lot of skills such as cloning, tissue culture, DNA, RNA and protein extractions required to genotype the Rat lines.

Although my work is mainly faculty research driven, I am heavily involved in our group's work as part of the National Bioscience Research Infrastructure in Transformative Genomics. I am involved in setting up new technology within the group and I am part of the team liaising with customers interested in starting up new projects in our group. Another large part of my role is to deliver training courses; I run a Single Cell Laboratory course, a Spatial Transcriptomics for Plant Users Workshop and I am involved in the Single Cell Bioinformatics course.