Kira E. Poskanzer

If you’re interested in generating proteomics data but your organism of interest doesn’t have a sequenced genome to use as a reference database, it is straightforward and useful to collect a transcriptome instead.

The way you generate a reference database has a real impact on the completeness and results of proteomics experiments.

We generated a whole-genome assembly for the lone star tick to serve as a reference for downstream efforts where whole-genome maps are required. We created our assembly using pooled DNA from salivary glands of 50 adult female ticks that we sequenced using PacBio HiFi reads.

We are interested in neuroactive metabolites that influence animal behavior. Some fungi have horizontally transferred neuroactive metabolite pathways between species. We used a horizontal gene transfer detection pipeline to screen for novel fungal genes tied to neuroactivity.

We implemented a lightweight method to identify viruses in 342 human brain bulk and single-cell sequencing data sets, and identified two glioblastoma cells from a single patient that contained deltapolyomavirus sequences.

We investigated protein structure predictions as an alternative to protein sequence homology for comparing single-cell RNA-seq data across species.