Dr Nick Grayson

Bioinformatician

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

I have a background in Biochemistry and a masters in Bioinformatics. Following this I completed a PhD where I modelled the replication of RNA viruses. I have also worked at the biotechnology company UCB Celltech. Previously I researched Epstein-Barr and other virus infections. Currently I project manage the Sanger side of sequencing 3000 bacterial and 500 virus genomes from Public Health England’s National Collection of Type Cultures.

The National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) is a resource of bacterial strains of medical, historical, scientific and veterinary importance operated by Public Health England (PHE). The NCTC provides bacterial cultures and associated services to academic, health, food and veterinary institutions worldwide.

The NCTC 3000 project, which I manage, is funded by a community resource grant awarded by the Wellcome trust to PHE Culture Collections and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. The project will produce 3000 high quality bacterial reference genomes and 500 viral reference genomes from the National Collection of Pathogenic Viruses (NCPV). All sequences are being made publicly available to scientists worldwide, in real-time, and will support research on a wide range of important pathogens such as Shigella, E. coli and Neisseria. We are also establishing an E-resource that will link sequencing data to all other available strain metadata (provenance, taxonomy, phenotypic characteristics and authentication data).
To date we have successfully sequenced over 1900 bacterial genomes from 35 different bacterial families. I will present the most recent progress of this large scale project specifically focusing on the generation of full bacterial genome sequences using Pacific Biosciences’ Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) sequencing technology.

Website: https://www.culturecollections.org.uk/about-us/nctc/
Twitter @NCTC_3000