Joanna Collins

Senior Computer Biologist

Joanna works as a Senior Computer Biologist within the Genome Reference Informatics Group as part of the Genome Reference Consortium (GRC). She is responsible for supporting the production of new reference assemblies for Human, Mouse and Zebrafish genomes with an aim to represent greater allelic diversity, fix errors and close gaps.

My current role at the Institute involves providing maintenance and improvements to biologically significant reference genomes. I am responsible for the curation of Human Chromosomes 14 and X, Mouse Chromosomes 3 and 19, and Zebrafish chromosomes 1,6,7,17 and 19. This is a very wide and varied role encompassing a number of aspects of data analysis to aid high quality genome construction this includes scrutinising and assembling raw sequence data, through to whole chromosome improvements utilising data such Optical maps.

I started at the Sanger Institute in 1996, prepping and sequencing samples for the Human Genome Project. From there I moved on to a role as a finisher, assembling the Sequence data for the Human, Mouse and Zebrafish Genomes. I became involved with the GRC in 2009 and have been in my current role for 3 years.