Ms Dorita Galea Agius, a doctoral student at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking, has attended and presented a poster at the 9th Plant Genomics & Gene Editing Congress: Europe held at The Hague, on the 11 and 12 April, 2022.
The poster, titled ‘The correctness, completeness and contiguity of a de novo genome assembly depend on the assembler utilized’ is co-authored by Dr Jean-Paul Ebejer from the Centre of Molecular Medicine and Biobanking, and Dr Rosienne Farrugia from the Department of Applied Biomedical Science.
The poster, which was well-received, describes a review of different bioinformatics tools employed in de novo genome assembly. Genomes are sequenced in multiple fragments using advanced sequencing technologies. The sequences of these fragments have to be re-assembled in order to form the genome model. Bioinformatics software tools called assemblers are used for this purpose. The final genome model must be correct, complete, and not fragmented to be useful in further -omics studies, gene mining and evolutionary studies amongst others.
Ms Galea Agius assessed assemblies generated by different assemblers from the same sequencing dataset against reference genomes of model plant species. The aim of this research is to establish a pipeline for de novo genomic studies at the University of Malta. The first endemic genomes which are being sequenced and assembled are those of Limonium melitense and L. zeraphae.
This research is financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the Research Excellence Programme (Project EDGE; REP-2020-009). This research work is also partly funded by the Tertiary Education Scholarships Scheme run by the Ministry of Education and Employment.
Ms Galea Agius is also a member of the teaching staff of the Biology Department at the Junior College