Interview – Brian Haas Manager of Genome Annotation, Outreach, Bioinformatics and Analysis Broad Institute

 

Brian Haas speaks to Izzy Scott Moncrieff in the run up to the  upcoming RNA-Seq 2013 Summit, 18th–20^th June 2013, Boston, MA

Brian has been based at the Broad Institute since 2007. His main areas of focus include gene discovery and genome annotation, and he was part of a  collective effort to write the Trinity software for RNA-Seq de novo assembly.

What initially attracted you to RNA-Seq?

Much of my work over the years has involved developing software for leveraging transcript data to annotate genomes and resolve gene structures. I initially started at the Institute for Genomic Research in 1999 and moved to the Broad Institute in 2007. During that time I’ve worked on a large number of genome projects, many of which involved eukaryotes with complex genomes. One of the primary tasks was to identify all genes before we could do more in-depth analysis. The earliest work involved using EST sequences and full-length cDNAs. Those were sequenced using the earlier Sanger sequencing technology, which was rather expensive. With today’s technology, RNA-Seq, we can sample the transcriptome cheaply and more comprehensively, so it’s a very attractive way of capturing the same types of data to help with annotating gene structures. This was what originally attracted me to the technology, as I wanted to find a way to use these short RNA-Seq reads to identify transcripts in the genome and use them like I would ESTs or other cDNA sequences.

Download a PDF of the entire interview at – http://rna-seqsummit.com/library