Dr Jennifer Harrow

Dr Jennifer Harrow's research involves improving genome annotation methodology and examining experimental datasets to obtain highly accurate gene annotation of human, mouse and zebrafish reference genomes.

Jennifer graduated from University of Leeds in 1988 with BSc in Biochemistry. She earned a PhD in Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge University analysing the pantothenate biosynthesis pathway.

Before joining the Sanger Institute, Jennifer spent six years at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) working on the Swissprot database and then joining the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) group of Hartmut Oschkinat.

In 2000, Jennifer moved to the Institute to head the Havana manual annotation team. She has subsequently been involved in a number of major international collaborations, including generating the GENCODE annotation for ENCODE project, collaborating with NCBI /UCSC and Ensembl to produce the CCDS annotation, and assessing gene predictions as part of EGASP and RGASP projects. She also collaborates with the Gerstein group at Yale on pseudogene analysis and has an interest in the identification on long non-coding RNAs.

Selected Publications

• Gene inactivation and its implications for annotation in the era of personal genomics.

  Balasubramanian S, Habegger L, Frankish A, MacArthur DG, Harte R, Tyler-Smith C, Harrow J and Gerstein M

  Genes & development 2011;25;1;1-10

  PUBMED: 21205862; PMC: 3012931; DOI: 10.1101/gad.1968411

• Identification and analysis of unitary pseudogenes: historic and contemporary gene losses in humans and other primates.

  Zhang ZD, Frankish A, Hunt T, Harrow J and Gerstein M

  Genome biology 2010;11;3;R26

  PUBMED: 20210993; PMC: 2864566; DOI: 10.1186/gb-2010-11-3-r26

• The consensus coding sequence (CCDS) project: Identifying a common protein-coding gene set for the human and mouse genomes.

  Pruitt KD, Harrow J, Harte RA, Wallin C, Diekhans M, Maglott DR, Searle S, Farrell CM, Loveland JE, Ruef BJ, Hart E, Suner MM, Landrum MJ, Aken B, Ayling S, Baertsch R, Fernandez-Banet J, Cherry JL, Curwen V, Dicuccio M, Kellis M, Lee J, Lin MF, Schuster M, Shkeda A, Amid C, Brown G, Dukhanina O, Frankish A, Hart J, Maidak BL, Mudge J, Murphy MR, Murphy T, Rajan J, Rajput B, Riddick LD, Snow C, Steward C, Webb D, Weber JA, Wilming L, Wu W, Birney E, Haussler D, Hubbard T, Ostell J, Durbin R and Lipman D

  Genome research 2009;19;7;1316-23

  PUBMED: 19498102; PMC: 2704439; DOI: 10.1101/gr.080531.108

• Dynamic instability of the major urinary protein gene family revealed by genomic and phenotypic comparisons between C57 and 129 strain mice.

  Mudge JM, Armstrong SD, McLaren K, Beynon RJ, Hurst JL, Nicholson C, Robertson DH, Wilming LG and Harrow JL

  Genome biology 2008;9;5;R91

  PUBMED: 18507838; PMC: 2441477; DOI: 10.1186/gb-2008-9-5-r91

• EGASP: the human ENCODE Genome Annotation Assessment Project.

  Guigó R, Flicek P, Abril JF, Reymond A, Lagarde J, Denoeud F, Antonarakis S, Ashburner M, Bajic VB, Birney E, Castelo R, Eyras E, Ucla C, Gingeras TR, Harrow J, Hubbard T, Lewis SE and Reese MG

  Genome biology 2006;7 Suppl 1;S2.1-31

  PUBMED: 16925836; PMC: 1810551; DOI: 10.1186/gb-2006-7-s1-s2

• GENCODE: producing a reference annotation for ENCODE.

  Harrow J, Denoeud F, Frankish A, Reymond A, Chen CK, Chrast J, Lagarde J, Gilbert JG, Storey R, Swarbreck D, Rossier C, Ucla C, Hubbard T, Antonarakis SE and Guigo R

  Genome biology 2006;7 Suppl 1;S4.1-9

  PUBMED: 16925838; PMC: 1810553; DOI: 10.1186/gb-2006-7-s1-s4

Related links:

• Key Personnel
• Vertebrate genome analysis
• Vertebrate Genome Annotation (VEGA)
• GENCODE
• CCDS
• EGASP