Bajuna Salehe, PhD

I am a Teaching Associate at the Bioinformatics Training Facility.

I am doing bioinformatics in genomics and also involved with development of computational methods for variant detection and predicting protein structures.

Currently, I am supporting the delivery of bioinformatics related training material to international institutions and organisations in collaboration with the UK Health Security Agency's New Variant Assessment Platform (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/new-variant-assessment-platform). I am also developing and delivering new training materials for the Bioinformatics Training Facility's portfolio of courses, focussing on bioinformatics related training material (e.g. proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics etc.).

Previously I was involved with the collaborative project between researchers from the University of Reading, National Institute for Agriculture and Botany (NIAB), and Birmingham University to investigate the mechanism by which Pseudomonas syringae causes canker disease in cherry plants. In that project I was involved with the development of bioinformatics pipeline to analyse large genomic data samples associated with canker cherry disease. I was also involved with IntFOLD project in the University of Reading, which primarily focused on the development of state-of-the-art methods for prediction and optimisation of 3D protein models mainly using machine learning and deep learning methods. In IntFOLD project I was involved particularly with the development of front-end tools and in-house training materials for understanding the 3D protein modelling from amino acid sequences.

Furthermore, I also worked as Bioinformatician for Genomics at the University Reading with the different genomics and post-genomic projects. In genomics I mainly use next generation sequencing (NGS) technique to understand microbial involvements in several aspects such agriculture (e.g biocontrol), energy, poultry and how these do have health impacts on human beings and other species. Generally, my research focuses on developing computational tools for understanding and decode biological data in the postgenomic era.