Welcome

…to Hannes Becher’s web pages! Hannes is a staff scientist at the Roslin Institute’s Highlander Lab. His background is in population genetics and bioinformatics.

News

• Paper and R package published on PCA visualisation of large pedigrees, blog post here.
• Looking for student interns (any level of experience) who want to work on k-mer methods or pangenome assembly
• Hannes is extending AlphaSimR, a forwards-in-time genetic simulator for breeding programmes. He is adding compatibility for ARGs in tree sequence format.

Teaching/learning

Power calculations are extremely useful when setting up experiments. They are increasingly asked for in grant applications. Hannes has developed some materials on how to run power calculations in R. Code examples included. See here (UoE login required).

Hannes helped develop two stats courses, Introduction to Statistics with R and Statistics for High-Dimensional Data. These are interactive Carpentries-style courses that include live coding.

K-mers

One of Hannes’ research interests are k-mer methods. Get in touch if you are interested in method development in programming. Here are some links relating to Hannes’ work:

• A paper on dissecting genome size differences using k-mers
• Polyploid k-mer app, Tetmer (on GitHub). Infer population parameters from k-mer a spectrum!
• Watch Hannes’ workshop talk on fitting population parameters to k-mer spectra, slides here

Student Projects and Internships

Get in touch should you be interested in a student project/internship on bioinformatics, genomics, k-mers, pangenomes, genetic simulations, or statistics.

Links

• British Bryological Society (BBS)
• Hannes is a fan of the Julia programming language
• Hannes used to work at Edinburgh’s IGMM/HGU as a statistician at the Bioinformatics Analysis Core
• Hannes is former member of the Twyford Lab at The University of Edinburgh.