Since its launch in July 2009, The Genome Analysis Centre has continued to develop and has recently welcomed a selection of new talent to their already excellent scientific research and analysis teams.

Kirsten McLay has joined TGAC from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute as Sequencing Operations Manager overseeing the delivery of high throughput sequencing. Kirsten brings a wealth of experience in high throughput DNA sequencing and finishing, running genome sequence production and targeted re- sequencing teams, and management and delivery of collaborative projects using high throughput sequencing technologies.

Joining Kirsten is Melanie Febrer who will lead the Library Construction Team.
Melanie and her team will generate libraries for next generation sequencing platforms along with other types of libraries (BAC and Fosmid libraries mainly).

Melanie joins us from the John Innes Centre where she carried out Postdoctoral research in Brachypodium and wheat genomics.

Mark Alston joined us at the start of January from the Institute of Food Research and is an integral part of the bioinformatics team where he works on the annotation of bacterial genomes with an interest in epigenetics.

Also joining the Bioinformatics team is Xingdong Bian (Web Developer) who will implement and maintain the web-based interfaces (GUIs) of the different internal systems (LIMS). As the TGAC systems evolve to offer more functionality, Xingdong will interact with users to improve interfaces, meet new requirements and propose novel ways of visualising the ever-growing genomic data that TGAC generates (Genome Browsers). Xingdong brings with him knowledge and experience of software and web development.

For further details please visit www.tgac.bbsrc.ac.uk