Alex Makunin

Postdoctoral Fellow

Alex works with genome sequencing data from the malaria vector mosquitoes, both exploring novel data and getting new insights from existing datasets.

Alex joined Mara Lawniczak and Dominic Kwiatkowski groups in early 2018 as a joint postdoctoral fellow to work on comparative and population genomics data in Anopheles. He is also interested in getting additional insights from the high-throughput sequencing datasets, e.g. exploring structural variation, repetitive DNA landscapes, and microbial symbiont communities.

Before joining Sanger Institute he worked in the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (Novosibirsk, Russia). He started his work as a molecular biology student of the Novosibirsk State University, then shifted to bioinformatics and ended up defending his PhD thesis on high-throughput sequencing of supernumerary (or B) chromosomes in mammals. Apart from this main project, he participated in phylogenetics and population genetics projects for diverse taxa, some of which involved ancient DNA.

As a part of PhD training, for 2012-2015 Alex joined Dobzhasky Center of Genome Bioinformatics (Saint-Petersburg, Russia) to work on cat genome mapping. There, he also participated in assembly, annotation, and comparisons of mammalian genomes.