Rachel Brenchley

Biography

I have a BSc (Hons) in Molecular Biology from the University of Manchester. Following my degree I stayed at the University of Manchester to complete an MSc in Bioinformatics and then a PhD also in Bioinformatics. My PhD project involved working on computational methods to classify protein phosphatases and I applied these methods to define the phosphatase family in three protozoan parasite genomes. During my PhD I became interested in genomics and I went on to work in this area for nearly five years at the University of Liverpool as a postdoctoral research associate. I joined the University of Salford as a Lecturer in 2014.

Research Interest

I am interested in studying how genomes evolve and how adaptive traits arise. My interest is particularly in how the genome sequences of related species differ at the whole-genome level, and I study the contribution of events, such as, whole-genome duplications, and gene family expansion/loss, to the emergence of phenotypic traits. My research has mostly focussed on plants but I am interested generally in genomic changes within eukaryotes and have also worked with insect, protozoan parasite, and nematode genomes. My expertise is with genome sequencing data and bioinformatics tools to assemble, annotate, and perform comparative genomics analyses between different species.