Lucia Nikolaeva-Reynolds

Researcher

uu19735@bristol.ac.uk

Current Appointments:

Previous Appointments:

Education:
M.Sci. Biology, University of Bristol, 2019-2023

Twitter: @

GitHub:

Interests: Nanopore Sequencing, Metagenomics, Ecology

Biography

I am investigating the use of a targeted nanopore sequencing approach using CRISPR-Cas9 enrichment for fast and reliable nematode species identification. Nematodes are indicators of environmental health, and high-throughput techniques allow identification of a greater number of individuals from environmental samples compared to laborious morphological methods. My method uses the principle of ‘metabarcoding’; sequencing a marker gene for identification of multiple species in a sample. Current methods rely on Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplification of a marker gene prior to sequencing which can introduce significant bias, skewing abundance estimates of the species present. Targeted nanopore sequencing using CRISPR-Cas9 enrichment does not require amplification, thus has the potential to remove amplification-associated bias from the process.

Pre-prints

Cas9-based enrichment for targeted long-read metabarcoding
Nikolaeva-Reynolds L., Cammies C., Crichton R., Gorochowski T.E.
bioRxiv, 2024. (DOI: 10.1101/2024.12.02.626365)