David Marshall

From a background of population genetics and the evolution of plant mating systems my research interests have increasingly focussed on the development of genetic marker technologies and DNA sequence diversity in both crop and wild plants and their deployment in applications from the analysis of the genetic structure of natural and breeding populations of crop plants to genome analysis and comparative genomics. The major focus of my interests has been on genetic marker applications with barley, potatoes, wheat  and soft fruit (blackcurrant and raspberry) in collaboration with Professor Robbie Waugh and other Geneticists at Dundee, in particular, the    design and application of SNP-based genotyping arrays. The original focus was initially from public domain EST sequence resources but with the advent of Next Generation Sequencing technologies this has shifted first to the extensive RNA-seq data that have been developed with colleagues in the ICS and CMS Groups at Dundee and with Dr Andrew Flavell from the University of Dundee. The advent of RNA-seq data is also leading to a step change in the analysis of alternative splicing in plants and we are currently working with Professor John Brown’s group to analyse RNA seq data sets from a range of tissues to identify the extent and significance of transcript diversity in barley.  New sequencing technologies have also enabled Whole Genome shotgun sequencing of our target genomes as well as novel approaches to diversity analysis through Genotyping by Sequencing (GbyS) or Exome Capture and re-sequencing.   The resulting availability of more extensive genome sequence resources is currently underpinning major new developments in the characterisation of key gene families in our target crops.