Ioannis Chrysostomakis

Field of work

I'm a biologist and bioinformatician with a passion for evolutionary biology and genomics. I am interested in the ways that evolution has been imprinted on the genome of species whether that involves phenotypic traits or allele frequency changes, which is why I'm excited to work on this project. The creation of high-quality genomes from a high number of species would greatly aid future studies. To investigate the utility of museum samples in producing high-quality genome assemblies, in this project, I will create and analyse genome assemblies of kilobase-sized PacBio HiFi DNA sequences from endangered or unique museum specimens to and establish bioinformatics pipelines for doing so. I will characterise the quality of the sequencing and use them to look into the phenotypic differences, gene evolution and phylogeny of those specimens. Ideally, this project should open the road to a more widespread use of museum collections in biodiversity studies.

Research interests

• Genotyping and genome assembly
• Molecular and phenotypic evolution
• Adaptation and biodiversity
• Phylogenomics