Chris Duran, PhD Student
Qualifications
IMB 6W, 6.146
University of Queensland
St Lucia, QLD, 4072
+61.7.334.62604
c.duran@uq.edu.au
- BSc. in Computer Science & Evolutionary Biology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
About Me
Heya! I joined the newly forming ACPFG Bioinformatics lab in May 2007. Before this venture I have stuck my fingers in a number of different honey pots. In 2004, I graduated with a BSc from the University of Queensland. My majors were in Computer Science and Evolutionary Biology. Also during 2004 and in collaboration with two partners, I established a business developing custom content systems using web services technologies such as PHP/mySQL. In 2006, I was able to gain a position in the Bioinformatics group for the Mammalian Genetics Unit of the Medical Research Council in Harwell, Oxfordshire. It was there that I was working on the EuroPhenome project, which was developed to store mouse-derived phenome data from various high-throughput phenotyping centres throughout Europe. My primary responsibility was to lead the software development of the EuroPhenome database and related interfaces, with a focus on transfer format standardization using technologies such as XML.
Research Interests
Wheat and barley are key crops for Australian agriculture and the export economy. Production of these cereals is often limited by environmental factors including drought and soil salinity. Unfortunately, the genomes of wheat and barley are both very large and complex and cannot readily be resolved by current genome sequencing methods. New genome sequencing technologies promise the ability to decipher these complex sequences. Additionally, the sequencing of the related model species Brachypodium's genome is expected to be completed during 2008. This genome sequence information may well prove to supersede rice as the model organism used for wheat and barley studies. My project aims to develop and apply bioinformatics tools and techniques for comparative genetic and genomic analysis of wheat and barley crop data. This analysis will have a comparative evolution focus and use Brachypodium as a model organism.
Publications
JOURNAL ARTICLES
- Duran C, Appleby N, Vardy M, Imelfort M, Edwards D, Batley J (2009) Single nucleotide polymorphism discovery in barley using autoSNPdb. Plant Biotechnology Journal. 7, 326-333.
- Imelfort M, Duran C, Batley J, Edwards D (2009) Discovering genetic polymorphisms in next-generation sequencing data. Plant Biotechnology Journal. 7, 312-317.
- Duran C, Appleby N, Edwards D, Batley J (2009) Molecular Genetic Markers: Discovery, Applications, Data Storage and Visualisation. Current Bioinformatics. 4, 16-27.
- Duran C, Appleby N, Clark T, Wood D, Imelfort M, Batley J, Edwards D (2009) AutoSNPdb: an annotated single nucleotide polymorphism database for crop plants. Nucleic Acids Research. 37, D951-D953.
- Hancock J, Adams N, Aidinis V, Blake A, Blake J, Bogue M, Brown S, Chesler E, Davidson D, Duran C, Eppig J, Gailus-Durner V, Gates H, Gkoutos G, Greenaway S, Hrabe de Angelis M, Kollias G, Leblanc S, Lee K, Lengger C, Maier H, Mallon A-M, Masuya H, Melvin D, Muller W, Parkinson H, Proctor G, Reuveni E, Schofield P, Shukla A, Smith C, Toyoda T, Vasseur L, Wakana S, Walling A, White J, Wood J, Zouberakis M. (2007) Integration of mouse phenome data resources. Mammalian Genome. 18, 157-63.
BOOK CHAPTERS
- Duran C, Edwards D and Batley J. Molecular Marker Discovery and Genetic map Visualisation. In: Applied Bioinformatics: Tools and Applications. Ed. Edwards D, Hanson D and Stajich J. Springer. AUGUST 2009.
- Duran C, Edwards D and Batley J. Genetic maps and the use of synteny. In: Plant Genomics. Ed. Somers D, Langridge P, and Gustafson JP. Methods in Molecular Biology, Humana Press (USA). APRIL 2009.