Andrew Thrasher

After spending the summer of 2011 at an internship where I did work on rapid genotyping of bacterial genome samples, I returned to the University of Notre Dame for my 3rd year of Ph.D. studies. The work that I had done prior on the MAKER platform was polished and submitted to ICCABS 2012 and was accepted for publication. In addition to this I have been working on my Ph.D. proposal which will involve some of the rapid genotyping work I've done prior and new applications in the realm of metagenomics and ecological genomics. My goal is to develop methods that are directed at analysis of sequencing data from natural environments rather than in-bred laboratory strains.

My research recently has focused on the MAKER annotation tool. As part of my work, I have adapted it for use with the Work Queue distributed computing framework. We are now capable of running MAKER annotations on distributed heterogeneous systems. Additionally, I have been working with CEGMA (Core Eukaryotic Gene Mapping Approach) to create initial HMMs for use with the SNAP ab-initio gene predictor. This work has primarily been in support of the Vectorbase site.

I presented a paper entitled "Taming Complex Bioinformatics Workflows with Weaver, Makeflow and Starch" at the 5th Workshop of Workflows in Support of Large-scale Science at Supercomputing 2010 in New Orleans, LA. Further details on the paper and the text can be found on my Research page.