Temitope Oriowo

Field of work

I am an animal scientist turned bioinformatician. I am interested in computational analysis of genomic data to understand populations. I completed my Bachelor's degree in Animal Science at Bowen University, Iwo, Nigeria and my Master's degree in Animal Breeding and Genetics as part of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master's Programme at Wageningen University, The Netherlands and the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria, which led me to develop a core interest in genomics and the analysis of genomic datasets.

My PhD research focuses on unravelling the genetic diversity of Eurasian minnows (Phoxinus spp.) in tributaries of the Sieg river system. Previous studies have discovered the presence of several species belonging to the cryptic genus Phoxinus in some tributaries, and some have even suggested that these species are hybridising, but these studies have relied on the analysis of single genes such as cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 (COI), which cannot conclusively prove hybridisation. I intend to assemble and annotate the reference genome for the Phoxinus phoxinus before eventually analysing whole genome sequence datasets generated from our extensive sampling of the Sieg river system. I intend to investigate the population structure and demographic history of Phoxinus spp. I will also attempt to detect and decipher signatures of evolutionary processes such as introgression in the genome either through sequence variation or structural variation such as inversions.

Research interests

• Population Structure and Demographic History
• Evolutionary Processes and Hybridization detection
• Whole genome sequence data analysis
• Genome assembly and annotation