Meet the scientists!

My group creates resources that other scientists can use in their work.  The biggest and most well known resource is called Ensembl (http://www.ensembl.org) and provides annotation and other information for vertebrate genomes.  In this case annotation means the location of genes, variation and information about how the genome controls and regulates other processes.  All of the information that we provide through Ensembl is completely free for other people to use. We also provide much of the data management infrastrcture for the 1000 Genomes Project meaning that my group is one of the biggest users of disk space and internet bandwidth at the EBI.

Besides Ensembl, my group runs large databases that store human variation data and connections between this data and disease.  Storing this type of data require special data security because each person’s genome sequence is unique. 

Finally, my research group is trying to understand how the genome evolves into the functions that it has.  For example, human liver and mouse liver do very much the same thing and use genes that are very closely related to perform these functions.  Because of this, most people expected that the way that these genes were controlled would be almost identical between human and mouse.  However, this is now seems not to be the case and we have shown that there are more differences in the gene regulation than was initially thought.  We are working to understand these differences more fully.

When I am not travelling, I normally come into work about an hour before most of the other people do so that I can have a relaxing cup of coffee, plan out my day and get caught up on email or other issues.  In a typical day I will meet with at least one student or post doc regarding his or her research and two or more of the teams working on Ensembl or one of the other big projects.  There will often be at least one conference call in the afternoon timed so that scientists in the US and Europe can all attend.  I will also normally work on writing either a paper, a grant or some other information and often I will be working on reviewing papers or grants that other scientists have written.

I do travel a lot for work and am normally away about 10-12 days per month.  Those days actually have less variety than normal work days at the institute because travel is mostly to all day meetings or to larger conferences.  I often give talks at the meetings or conferences describing the most recent work from the group.

Genome sequencing and especially the recent advances in sequencing technology are fundamental to my work.  The resources that we create in Ensembl start with whole genome sequences from about 60 different species with human and mouse being the most popular.  But it is more that just the whole genome sequence: genome sequencing is creating maps of human variation in the 1000 Genomes project and is being used to map the sites of genome regulation as part of my research group.  These are just two examples of the many ways we use genome sequencing.