Comparative Genomics of Non-Model Invertebrates

Anne Guichard

Anne Guichard is working on ESR Project 11: Assembly and annotation of heterozygous insect genomes under the supervision of Dr. Denis Tagu at INRA Rennes. Although there are countless initiatives such as i5K for sequencing insects, these efforts are hampered by their often complex, very large and highly heterozygous genomes. New hybrid assembly strategies using both short (Illumina) and long reads (Oxford Nanopore/PacBio), as well as approaches based on genome mapping (10x Genomics) or chromosome conformation capture (3C) may be used to alleviate these problems. This project will aim to test new approaches for increasing the quality of the assembly of large and complex heterozygous genomes of target insect species.

Before IGNITE, Anne did her MSc in Biotechnology at the ENSTBB (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Technologies des Biomolécules de Bordeaux), France. During her studies, she did a 6-months internship at New England Biolabs, USA, where she studied the horizontal gene transfer between two bacteria, by doing genetics engineering. After her studies, she joined Agenus, UK, an immuno-oncology company, as a Research Associate. There, she had a brief experience with bioinformatics that she really enjoyed and she then decided to take a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in programming. She discovered that she really likes programming and developed a strong interest in bioinformatics. As she has always been very interested by scientific research, working at INRA Rennes, on the assembly and annotation of heterozygous insect genomes, is a good opportunity for her to become an expert in bioinformatics while working on a research project.

Anne’s scientific interests mainly involve genomics and programming. She is very fascinated by how we can get all the life’s information of an organism encoded in its genome, using bioinformatics and all the possible applications it has in various fields (environmental, agricultural, pharmaceutical, medical sciences). Besides science, Anne enjoys playing the piano, traveling and hiking. In her free time, she also likes doing yoga and nature watching.
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