John is a Senior Bioinformatician with more than 25 years’ experience. With DNA sequencing playing an ever-increasing role in the agri-food and environmental sectors, so bioinformatics capabilities at Fera continue to expand. John’s role includes leading this development as well as management and delivery of diverse projects for commercial and public-sector customers.

This work variously involves analysis of DNA barcode, metabarcode and metagenomic data for identification of pests, pathogens and resistance, as well as microbiome characterisation. Areas of focus include the crop-plant, soil and food contexts. Underpinning this work are bioinformatics resource management, programming, algorithm development and pipeline implementation.

Current and recent projects relate to GMOs and food safety; development of new metagenomics approaches to profiling soil health; characterisation of antimicrobial resistant bacteria in foods and food factory microbiomes; and development of tools for genome-based outbreak source-tracing of plant-pathogenic bacteria.