Dr Paul Kersey
Director of Science - Research
As Deputy Director of Science with responsibility for research, I oversee the pursuit of four of Kew’s key scientific priorities, namely Ecosystem Stewardship, Trait diversity and Function, the Digital Revolution, and Accelerating Taxonomy. My own research is focused on genomics and bioinformatics, which play an increasing role in Kew’s scientific mission. Recent advances in sequencing technology offer us the opportunity to catalogue, understand and compare biological diversity, not least that contained within our collections, at a molecular level on an unprecedented scale, but bring challenges in data management, analysis and dissemination. Prior to arriving at Kew, I worked at the European Bioinformatics Institute helping to run some of the world’s largest biological databases, and am active in several genome sequencing and standards development projects.
- Msc, Univ. York 1999
- PhD, Univ. Edinburgh 1995
- BA (Hons), Univ. Cambridge 1991
-
Tree of Life
We lead Kew's research to expand and populate the tree of life for plants and fungi. -
Darwin Tree of Life
Sequencing the genomes of all eukaryotic species in Britain and Ireland. -
1001 Genomes Plus
Cataloging genetic diversity within a single plant species, and building a computational framework to support its analysis and visualisation. -
Plants for Health
A global reference enabling regulators, industry, health practitioners and researchers to reliably access and exchange information concerning health products derived from plants or fungi. -
Activated Genebank Network (AGENT)
Establishing a global genebank network to sustainably unlock the genetic diversity of food crops for future generations and make them intuitively accessible for modern breeding programmes
Rastogi, A., Maheswari, U., Dorrell, R.G., Jimenez Vieira, F.R., Maumus, F., Kustka, A., McCarthy, J., Allen, A.E., Kersey, P., Bowler, C. & Tirichine, L. (2018).
Integrative analysis of large scale transcriptome data draws a comprehensive landscape of Phaeodactylum tricornutum genome and evolutionary origin of diatoms.
Scientific reports 8: 4834.
Halewood, M., Chiurugwi, T., Sackville Hamilton, R., Kurtz, B., Marden, E., Welch, E., Michiels, F., Mozafari, J., Sabran, M., Patron, N., Kersey, P., Bastow, R., Dorius, S., Dias, S., McCouch, S. & Powell, W. (2018).
Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture: opportunities and challenges emerging from the science and information technology revolution.
New Phytologist 217: 1407–1419.
Clavijo, B.J., Venturini, L., Schudoma, C., Garcia Accinelli, G., Kaithakottil, G., Wright, J., Borrill, P., Kettleborough, G., Heavens, D., Chapman, H., Lipscombe, J., Barker, T., Lu, F.-H., McKenzie, N., Raats, D., Ramirez-Gonzalez, R.H., Coince, A., Peel, N., Percival-Alwyn, L., Duncan, O., Trösch, J., Yu, G., Bolser, D.M., Namaati, G., Kerhornou, A., Spannagl, M., Gundlach, H., Haberer, G., Davey, R.P., Fosker, C., Di Palma, F., Phillips, A., Millar, A.H., Kersey, P.J., Uauy, C., Krasileva, K.V., Swarbreck, D., Bevan, M.W. & Clark, M.D. (2017)
An improved assembly and annotation of the allohexaploid wheat genome identifies complete families of agronomic genes and provides genomic evidence for chromosomal translocations.
Genome Research 27: 885-896.
Mascher, M., Gundlach, H., Himmelbach, A., Beier, S., Twardziok, S.O., Wicker, T., Radchuk, V., Dockter, C., Hedley, P.E., Russell, J., Bayer, M., Ramsay, L., Liu, H., Haberer, G., Zhang, X.-Q., Zhang, Q., Barrero, R.A., Li, L., Taudien, S., Groth, M., Felder, M., Hastie, A., Šimková, H., Staňková, H., Vrána, J., Chan, S., Muñoz-Amatriaín, M., Ounit, R., Wanamaker, S., Bolser, D., Colmsee, C., Schmutzer, T., Aliyeva-Schnorr, L., Grasso, S., Tanskanen, J., Chailyan, A., Sampath, D., Heavens, D., Clissold, L., Cao, S., Chapman, B., Dai, F., Han, Y., Li, H., Li, X., Lin, C., McCooke, J.K., Tan, C., Wang, P., Wang, S., Yin, S., Zhou, G., Poland, J.A., Bellgard, M.I., Borisjuk, L., Houben, A., Doležel, J., Ayling, S., Lonardi, S., Kersey, P., Langridge, P., Muehlbauer, G.J., Clark, M.D., Caccamo, M., Schulman, A.H., Mayer, K.F.X., Platzer, M., Close, T.J., Scholz, U., Hansson, M., Zhang, G., Braumann, I., Spannagl, M., Li, C., Waugh, R. & Stein, N. (2017).
A chromosome conformation capture ordered sequence of the barley genome.
Nature 544: 427.
Ćwiek-Kupczyńska, H., Altmann, T., Arend, D., Arnaud, E., Chen, D., Cornut, G., Fiorani, F., Frohmberg, W., Junker, A., Klukas, C., Lange, M., Mazurek, C., Nafissi, A., Neveu, P., van Oeveren, J., Pommier, C., Poorter, H., Rocca-Serra, P., Sansone, S.-A., Scholz, U., van Schriek, M., Seren, Ü., Usadel, B., Weise, S., Kersey, P. & Krajewski, P. (2016).
Measures for interoperability of phenotypic data: minimum information requirements and formatting.
Plant Methods 12: 44.
.jpg.webp?itok=ynLt3jH- "Digitised Herbarium specimen © RBG Kew.")
Get in touch
Telephone
+44 (0) 208 332 5199