Characterization of complex structural variations in cancer genomes with long reads

PROFESSOR LACHLAN COIN
Group Leader - Cancer Bioinformatics
Department of Clinical Pathology and Department of Microbiology and Immunology
University of Melbourne

In this talk Lachlan will describe work that explored use of long-read sequencing in characterisation of a primary and metastatic tumour.  He will describe how long read nanopore sequencing can uncover variation in repetitive regions of the human genome which cannot be characterised with short read sequencing, including genomic insertions, deletions and other complex rearrangements, and how we can further utilise nanopore sequencing to uncover changes in methylation in these regions.  He will also describe utility of methods for selectively enriching genomic regions of interest for sequencing, without using PCR.

Professor Lachlan Coin completed a PhD in bioinformatics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, followed by postdoctoral work in the Department of Medicine, Imperial College London, and lab head role at the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Queensland.  In 2019 he moved to the University of Melbourne.   His team uses long read sequencing in a variety of settings, including genome and meta-genome assembly and characterisation of genomic structural variation.