Happy Anniversary, Human Genome Project

On this day 18 years ago, 15th February 2001, the first draft human genome sequence was published by the Human Genome Project consortium in Nature, along with some preliminary analysis from the project. Although a more complete version of the sequence published in 2003 is considered to be the true culmination of the project, the […]

Nanopore sequencing the pertussis genome: the easy (long) version

I saw someone recommend that for every paper you publish, you should have an easy-to-understand summary online somewhere. So here’s a summary of my recently published paper, Resolving the complex Bordetella pertussis genome using barcoded nanopore sequencing! There’s quite a lot of background to include, so here I’m doing a very long but thoroughly explained summary, and […]

My first peer-reviewed research paper!

Following closely on the heels of my “publishing a pre-print paper” earlier this week, I can happily say the very same paper has now been published in a real, peer-reviewed, journal: Microbial Genomics. The publishing process was actually relatively painless; I submitted my first version of the paper on the 31st July 2018, swiftly realised […]

Publishing a pre-print paper

As anyone who’s done it before will probably know, publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal is a long, iterative and arduous journey. The easy part is writing your paper, formatting it according to the style of the journal you want to submit to and submitting it to that journal using their submission system (which, […]

Outreach & Engagement Symposium, 14th November 2018

Scrolling through Twitter last week (as I tend to do a few times a day…), I saw a last minute call for people to sign up to the Royal Society of Biology’s inaugural Outreach & Engagement Symposium, hosted up at the University of Birmingham. Although it’s been a while since I indulged in my public […]

The Roller Coaster

A few weeks after starting our PhD projects, a few of us attended two courses on the same day, both presented by Hugh Kearns from Thinkwell. The first was “How to plan your PhD” , and the second was “The seven secrets of highly successful research students“. Many of the tips I heard that day still […]

My PhD project – an overview

What’s the background? The working title when I applied for my PhD project was “A novel mechanism for phenotypic variation in Bordetella pertussis“. Whilst it had quite an open-ended title, the original plan for the project was fairly well-established: investigate whether differences in the arrangement of the genome in different strains of the bacterium cause them […]

Better late than never?!

Writing a blog during a PhD has become so common these days that it felt a bit too cliché, and I didn’t start one from the beginning of my project in October 2016. However, there have been a few occasions recently where something has happened, and I’ve found myself thinking “this would make a good […]