Professor Mario Caccamo was appointed as the Head of Crop Bioinformatics at NIAB on 1st August 2015 and Managing Director of NIAB EMR in 2017.
A computer scientist by training, Professor Caccamo has over 15 years’ experience in life science research and big data, including specific projects to apply the latest DNA sequencing technologies and bioinformatics methods to advance scientific understanding of crop genetics and the interaction of agricultural crops with their environment.
Professor Caccamo has led the work on the assembly of the first whole-genome release of the wheat reference sequence and was also one of the founding co-chairs of the expert working group within the Wheat Initiative focused on the deployment of an international Wheat Information System. Professor Caccamo continues with his leading role in the cereal bioinformatics communities at both national and international levels.
Current research projects include:
• Developing pangenomic bioinformatics approaches for cereal crops
• Gene annotation for crop pangenomes
Recent publications:
• Ricardo H Ramirez-Gonzalez, Cristobal Uauy, Mario Caccamo (2015) PolyMarker: A fast polyploid primer design pipeline. Bioinformatics.
• KFX Mayer et al. (2014) A chromosome-based draft sequence of the hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) genome. Science.
• Richard M Leggett, Bernardo J Clavijo, Leah Clissold, Matthew D Clark, Mario Caccamo (2013). NextClip: an analysis and read preparation tool for Nextera long mate pair libraries. Bioinformatics.
• Mario Caccamo, Erich Grotewold (2013). Turning over a new leaf in plant genomics. Genome Biology.
• Zamin Iqbal, Mario Caccamo, Isaac Turner, Paul Flicek, Gil McVean (2012). De novo assembly and genotyping of variants using colored de Bruijn graphs. Nature Genetics
Click here for a complete list of publications.