Dr Paul Kersey

Deputy Director of Science - Research

Department

Specialism

Bioinformatics, Genomics, Digital Services

Biography

As Deputy Director of Science with responsibility for research, I oversee the pursuit of four of Kew’s key scientific priorities, namely Ecosystem Stewardship, Trait diversity and Function, the Digital Revolution, and Accelerating Taxonomy. My own research is focused on genomics and bioinformatics, which play an increasing role in Kew’s scientific mission. Recent advances in sequencing technology offer us the opportunity to catalogue, understand and compare biological diversity, not least that contained within our collections, at a molecular level on an unprecedented scale, but bring challenges in data management, analysis and dissemination. Prior to arriving at Kew, I worked at the European Bioinformatics Institute helping to run some of the world’s largest biological databases, and am active in several genome sequencing and standards development projects.

Qualifications and appointments

Msc, Univ. York 1999
PhD, Univ. Edinburgh 1995
BA (Hons), Univ. Cambridge 1991

Projects

Selected publications

Rastogi, A., Maheswari, U., Dorrell, R.G., Jimenez Vieira, F.R., Maumus, F., Kustka, A., McCarthy, J., Allen, A.E., Kersey, P., Bowler, C. & Tirichine, L. (2018).

Integrative analysis of large scale transcriptome data draws a comprehensive landscape of Phaeodactylum tricornutum genome and evolutionary origin of diatoms.

Scientific reports 8: 4834.

Halewood, M., Chiurugwi, T., Sackville Hamilton, R., Kurtz, B., Marden, E., Welch, E., Michiels, F., Mozafari, J., Sabran, M., Patron, N., Kersey, P., Bastow, R., Dorius, S., Dias, S., McCouch, S. & Powell, W. (2018).

Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture: opportunities and challenges emerging from the science and information technology revolution.

New Phytologist 217: 1407–1419.

Clavijo, B.J., Venturini, L., Schudoma, C., Garcia Accinelli, G., Kaithakottil, G., Wright, J., Borrill, P., Kettleborough, G., Heavens, D., Chapman, H., Lipscombe, J., Barker, T., Lu, F.-H., McKenzie, N., Raats, D., Ramirez-Gonzalez, R.H., Coince, A., Peel, N., Percival-Alwyn, L., Duncan, O., Trösch, J., Yu, G., Bolser, D.M., Namaati, G., Kerhornou, A., Spannagl, M., Gundlach, H., Haberer, G., Davey, R.P., Fosker, C., Di Palma, F., Phillips, A., Millar, A.H., Kersey, P.J., Uauy, C., Krasileva, K.V., Swarbreck, D., Bevan, M.W. & Clark, M.D. (2017)

An improved assembly and annotation of the allohexaploid wheat genome identifies complete families of agronomic genes and provides genomic evidence for chromosomal translocations.

Genome Research 27: 885-896.

Mascher, M., Gundlach, H., Himmelbach, A., Beier, S., Twardziok, S.O., Wicker, T., Radchuk, V., Dockter, C., Hedley, P.E., Russell, J., Bayer, M., Ramsay, L., Liu, H., Haberer, G., Zhang, X.-Q., Zhang, Q., Barrero, R.A., Li, L., Taudien, S., Groth, M., Felder, M., Hastie, A., Šimková, H., Staňková, H., Vrána, J., Chan, S., Muñoz-Amatriaín, M., Ounit, R., Wanamaker, S., Bolser, D., Colmsee, C., Schmutzer, T., Aliyeva-Schnorr, L., Grasso, S., Tanskanen, J., Chailyan, A., Sampath, D., Heavens, D., Clissold, L., Cao, S., Chapman, B., Dai, F., Han, Y., Li, H., Li, X., Lin, C., McCooke, J.K., Tan, C., Wang, P., Wang, S., Yin, S., Zhou, G., Poland, J.A., Bellgard, M.I., Borisjuk, L., Houben, A., Doležel, J., Ayling, S., Lonardi, S., Kersey, P., Langridge, P., Muehlbauer, G.J., Clark, M.D., Caccamo, M., Schulman, A.H., Mayer, K.F.X., Platzer, M., Close, T.J., Scholz, U., Hansson, M., Zhang, G., Braumann, I., Spannagl, M., Li, C., Waugh, R. & Stein, N. (2017).

A chromosome conformation capture ordered sequence of the barley genome.

Nature 544: 427.

Ćwiek-Kupczyńska, H., Altmann, T., Arend, D., Arnaud, E., Chen, D., Cornut, G., Fiorani, F., Frohmberg, W., Junker, A., Klukas, C., Lange, M., Mazurek, C., Nafissi, A., Neveu, P., van Oeveren, J., Pommier, C., Poorter, H., Rocca-Serra, P., Sansone, S.-A., Scholz, U., van Schriek, M., Seren, Ü., Usadel, B., Weise, S., Kersey, P. & Krajewski, P. (2016).