The first presentation, titled 'The long and the short of it...', will be delivered by Dave Baker (Quadram Institute, UK). This will be followed by a talk on 'Genomic diversity of Escherichia coli in the vertebrate gut: A West-African perspective' by Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK).
David is the head of the Sequencing suite at the Quadram Institute Bioscience, Norwich, UK, coordinating the sequencing of foodborne pathogens as part of BBSRC-funded research projects within the various Institutional Strategic Programmes. Before joining the Quadram Institute 4 years ago, he spent ten months implementing Next Generation Sequencing at Food Forensics (a commercial company) and, prior to that, was a team leader in the Genomics Pipelines Group at Earlham Institute (formally TGAC). His primary role involved running and maintaining Earlham Institute's NGS and Whole Genome Mapping platforms, from sample delivery to machine output. He was also involved in outreach activities to both internal and external audiences, interacting with individuals from a range of backgrounds and scientific understanding. For this, he was awarded the Cue East Award in 2011.
David has worked with DNA Sequencing technologies for more than 26 years. Graduating with a Mechanical Engineering first degree from Oxford Brookes University, he moved to Norfolk and worked at the Sainsbury Laboratory running their DNA Sequencers in 1995. In 2002, he moved to the John Innes Centre to develop TILLING on the ABI3730 capillary sequencing platform. In the summer of 2009, David became one of the first members of TGAC. He recently developed the CoronaHIT protocol—a high throughput method for sequencing Covid-19 genomes that is now widely used across the world (https://genomemedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13073-021- 00839-5).
Read more about my published works here: shorturl.at/vDSY7
Find me on Twitter @tweakyaustin and on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/david-baker-61a8ba10
This talk will cover a brief history of DNA sequencing and the progression from short to long read sequencing. He will also show how short read methodologies can be used for long read sequencing and how it can be adapted for sequencing Covid-19.