A huge well done to Iseult Jackson who passed her viva (with a complimentary assessment from the External Examiner!) on 13th May!
Iseult did her PhD project with Dan Bradley at Trinity College Dublin and worked on Ancient Genetic Disease.
Ancient genomics gives the opportunity to capture past diversity which may not be represented in modern genomes. Ancient genetics of disease is of interest to patients, but also has implications for understanding modern mutations and inferring their pathogenicity. However, it presents unique analytical problems that preclude use of data processing and analytical pipelines designed for modern genome data. These include post-mortem damage, contamination, short unpaired reads and most often, partial, low genome coverage. Iseult’s project built, optimised and validated pipelines for disease variant discovery in the past and uses these to make the first discoveries of such mutations in prehistory.