Stinus Lindgreen:
Bioinformatical approaches to RNA structure prediction & Sequencing of an ancient human genome

Date: 29-01-2010    Supervisor: Anders Krogh and Paul P. Gardner




Stinus Lindgreen has been working in two different fields during his Ph.D. The first part has been focused on computational approaches to predict the structure of non-coding RNA molecules at the base pairing level. This has resulted in the analysis of various measures of the base pairing potential in families of related RNA sequences. Also, the program MASTR was developed to perform simultaneous alignment of multiple RNA sequences and prediction of a common secondary structure. The webserver WAR was developed to make it easy for non-computer savy researchers to use the many RNA structure prediction tools that exist. The second part has been focused on the mapping and genotyping of ancient genomic DNA. The development of next generation sequencing technologies combined with the use of ancient DNA material present the researchers with some special challenges in the analyses. This work resulted in the publication of the first genome of an ancient human individual, where close to the theoretical maximum of the genome sequence was recovered with high confidence. Part of the project was the development of the program SNPest for genotyping and SNP calling that models various sources of error and predicts genotypes with the highest posterior probability.