Based in the School of Biosciences and offered in collaboration with the LGC, this BBSRC CASE award will look at next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, which have the potential to be used for measurement of a wide range of biological, environmental, and toxicological phenomena. The project will involve testing and validating NGS methods, including consistency between alternative methods (e.g. Illumina, 454, Quantitative PCR), accuracy, dynamic range for optimal accuracy, the robustness of technologies to increasingly complex mixtures of test material, variations in DNA library preparation protocols, inherent biases of each method and ability to reproduce measurements.

As part of the award you will have access to standard reference biological materials (well-characterised mixtures of two or more bacterial strains, for example) as well as Illumina (via Exeter) and 454 (via LGC) NGS platforms. You will also have access to more established analytical methods such as quantitative PCR. The first step will be to devise a series of metrics of reproducibility and bias. As well as classical statistical approaches such as linear regression, the project will also make use of bioinformatics approaches for tasks such as quality-filtering and mapping reads against reference sequences.

You will spend at least 6 months seconded to LGC’s laboratories in Teddington and it is also likely that you will have the opportunity to spend some time at one of LGC’s sites abroad (e.g. the Berlin laboratories where the 454 instrument is based).

Application deadline: 13th August 2010