Dr Ricardo H Ramírez González

Ricardo is currently working as a Postdoctoral Scientist doing bioinformatic analysis as part of the Designing Future Wheat project.

He is interested in data management and visualisation that can improve the understanding of wheat genomics.

In particular, Ricardo has focused on the wheat gene expression. Wheat is an interesting organism because it is composed of three different, yet related genomes that complicates its analysis, as traditionally it has been hard to distinguish the differences between the three genomes.

However, as sequencing technologies improve we can develop tools that distinguish the different copies of the genome. Thanks to technologies such as RNA-Seq we are able to study the gene expression of wheat across different conditions.

Several research groups had produced datasets that are now publicly available. With all that public information it is possible to explore the effects of polyploidisation under different conditions.

Besides exploring the effects, they have made all the data available at www.wheat-expression.com.

To validate genetic markers in a population, Ricardo has developed PolyMarker, a tool to simplify the design of genetic markers using competitive PCR amplification. All the tools developed by Ricardo are publicly available and he is an advocate of Open Data.

Ricardo studied Computer Science as an undergrad, and holds a PhD in Biology from the John Innes Centre and the Earlham institute.