Ricardo is a Computer Scientist who moved to bioinformatics shortly after graduating. Before starting his PhD, he worked at The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) in the United Kingdom doing genome assemblies and quality control of the data produced by the sequencing instruments. He is currently doing his PhD in collaboration between TGAC and the John Innes Centre. He is developing bioinformatic pipelines that can be used for wheat improvement using Next Generation Sequencing.

When he has some spare time, Ricardo loves being on the countryside with his bicycle or traveling the world.

Ricardo's current research project aims to improve the genetic markers for a resistance gene for Yellow Rust, Yr15. The methodology can be used to develop further genetic markers for breeding programs, for example they use RNA-Seq on a segregation population to find candidate SNPs. He developed a pipeline (PolyMarker) to produce genome-specific primers for High-throughput genotyping.

Ricardo asked his supervisors to nominate him to the IWGSC Early Career Award because "I think that the rest of the wheat community can use the approach we used for discovery of novel SNPs. Also, I think that PolyMarker has the potential to be used extensively in both breeding programs and for improving SNP-based markers. In both cases, the use of the CSS scaffolds enabled my research."

By receiving the IWGSC Early Career Award, Ricardo hopes to highlight the importance of bioinformatics and how collaboration between wet and dry scientists is important in the context of high-throughput technologies.

In the future, Ricardo would like to have an opportunity to get a position where he can integrate data from different sources, such as genetic markers, genomic variations and phenotypes. He foresees that the massive amount of markers being developed needs to be accessible to be effectively used.

More information

Ricardo presentation at PAG2015 was entitled "RNA-Seq Bulked Segregant Analysis Enables the Identification of High-Resolution Genetic Markers for Breeding in Hexaploid Wheat"