Paul Kersey begun his scientific career working on the molecular biology of fission yeast. Since 1999, he has worked at the European Bioinformatics Institute, and since 2009 has been leading the Ensembl Genomes project, an integrative platform providing access to genome-scale data from non-vertebrate species. His team is additionally involved in the collaborative development of a number of community-focused bioinformatics resources, including PomBase, VectorBase and WormBase.
He is the coordinator of transPLANT, a project that aims to unify European infrastructure in plant genomics, and is currently contributing to a variety of genomics projects including the sequencing and annotation of wheat, barley, biting midge and whitefly.

Growing volumes and diversity of data are creating new needs for biological data archives, integration services and interfaces. The European Bioinformatics Institute uses the Ensembl system as a central tool for the integration and dissemination of genomic data, and in recent years, its use was extended to plants. Cereal genomes are especially large and difficult to assemble, but are nonetheless increasingly available, including draft assemblies for the hexaploid genome of bread wheat.
In this talk, Paul Kersey will discuss the challenges in data management presented by large cereal genomes, demonstrate some solutions and explore what can be learnt through their large-scale comparative analysis.