Imagine that you are about to prepare a cake to share with your friends. The ratio between the different ingredients (e.g. water, butter, yeast and flour) will determine how soft, moist and dense the cake will be. Likewise, different tissues at different growth stages require different proportions of genes to be expressed. With the wheat […]
Gene expression bias in polyploid wheat Read More »
My overriding memory of learning about plant science in school is weighing hundreds of dried peas which at 16, I didn’t find particularly thrilling. As a result, when I started university, I thought I was mostly interested in human biology and pathology. I’ll admit this was also partially motivated by an obsession with forensics programmes
Weighing up a career in plant science Read More »
I did my PhD at the University of Liverpool performing mutant identification and epigenetic studies in wheat. These analyses heavily involved the use of bioinformatics. As I had no prior bioinformatics experience, having previously worked identifying treatment response biomarkers for human chronic lymphocytic leukemia, it was a steep learning curve for me, particularly in my
When I started my PhD at the University of Dundee, I spent about a year in the lab developing a ChIP-seq (chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by Next Generation Sequencing) protocol for barley. Foreseeing a bioinformatics* bottleneck, with the encouragement of my supervisor Prof. Andy Flavell, I set about learning Linux command line computing, data mining and
So you want to learn bioinformatics? Read More »
When you work with someone for four years, inevitably you get to know them extremely well a lot better than you ever imagined in some cases. When doing a PhD or other research project in plant biology, funny enough, we also get to know our plants very well. I saw Brachypodium distachyon for the first
Brachypodium distachyon – “the cute grass” Read More »
Anyone who visited Keith Edward’s group previously will no doubt remember the less than glamorous offices of OB120! However five years after plans for the new building were announced, the Bristol Life Sciences building is now finally a reality. Last summer we moved 300 metres up the hill to the shiny, new building in a
No matter how dense the SNP map is on a population, it it is essential to have good phenotypic data to relate it to. Sometimes, there is no other option than to do a field trial. Unfortunately, field trials go wrong. Although annoying, this provides the interesting challenge of dealing with the numerous unexpected issues
Field trials and tribulations Read More »
