Tree of Life Core Laboratory Team

Tree of Life Programme

The Core Laboratory team provides molecular biology support for all projects within the Tree of Life Programme.

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The Tree of Life Core Laboratory provides the wet lab molecular biology heart of the Tree of Life Genome Assembly Engine. The team works across all of the projects within the Tree of Life Programme, supporting Faculty Teams, providing secure sample flow into Scientific Operations, and continuously improving processes via R&D projects large and small.

The team is responsible for working with samples that have been collected by all of the varied partners and collaborators, extracting high molecular weight DNA and RNA, providing robust quality control and processing, and feeding this through to various sequencing platforms in order to generate the data required for reference level genome assembly.

The team has developed routine processes that can be applied at scale to an extremely large range of organisms, and are continuing to develop ever more refined methods for those taxonomic groups that provide more challenge.

Our people

Group lead

Dr Caroline Howard

Senior Scientific Manager

Caroline is responsible for overseeing the management of the wet lab processing of samples that come to Sanger to fulfil the scientific aims of the Tree of Life programme. This work involves developing and embedding processes, research and development of new protocols and equipment, developing systems to track work and samples, and working with colleagues and collaborators.

Core team

Dr Amy Denton

Advanced Research Assistant

Mr Benjamin Jackson

Advanced Research Assistant

Dr Abitha Thomas

Scientific Manager

Previous team members

Clare Cornwell

Quality Officer

Liam Prestwood

Scientific Manager

Edel Sheerin

Technical Specialist

Dr Michelle Strickland

Senior Research Assistant

Associated research

Collaborations

Collaboration

Aquatic Symbiosis Genomics Project

An ambitious project to read the genomes of 1,000 freshwater and marine species that represent more than 500 symbiotic relationships, ...

Collaboration

Darwin Tree of Life Project

The Darwin Tree of Life Project is a collaboration by scientific partners to produce high-quality reference genomes for all known species ...

Projects

Research project

Vertebrate Genomes Project

The Vertebrate Genomes Project

The Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) at the Sanger Institute aims to provide reference quality assemblies for hundreds of fish, rodents ...

Related groups

Science group

Blaxter Group

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Durbin Group

Computational Genomics

Population and evolutionary genomics, novel computational genomics methods, and related mathematical and statistical models.

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Jaron Group

Evolution of unusual reproductive mechanisms

We explore how evolution is driven by changes in DNA sequence and chromosome structure by analysing and comparing the genomes of ...

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Long Read Sequencing

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Genomics of rapid speciation and adaptation

Biodiversity is very unevenly distributed across the tree of life. While the evolution of new species typically takes millions of years, ...

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Vertebrate Resequencing

Informatics

The Vertebrate Resequencing (VR) team was responsible for handling the informatics and large scale sequencing projects for the Durbin and Adams ...

Wellcome Sanger Institute

Programmes and Facilities

Programme

Tree of Life

Investigates the diversity of complex organisms through sequencing and cellular technologies. We generate and use high-quality genome sequences to explore the ...