Chris Kent
PhD (Biosciences) · Research Associate, University of Birmingham
About
I develop bioinformatics methods and protocols for pathogen amplicon sequencing, as part of the ARTIC Network.
My research is the computational design of primer schemes for tiled amplicon sequencing, aiming for better coverage, robustness to variation, and ease of use for genomic surveillance. Choose the primers badly and you get a dropout: a hole in the genome, usually where the variant mattered.
I work across the wet-lab and dry-lab boundary, building open-source tools that help labs get reliable genomes out of clinical and environmental samples.
Software
- primalscheme3 (python)
Primer scheme design for tiled amplicon sequencing. - primalscheme labs (www)
Browser for published primer schemes and PrimalPanels. - primalbedtools (python)
Library and CLI for primer BED files: remap, sort, merge, generate amplicons. - primerschemes (quick-lab)
Machine-readable repository of released PrimerSchemes and PrimalPanels.