Responsibilities
Professor Mario Caccamo was appointed as the Head of Crop Bioinformatics at NIAB in 2015, Managing Director of NIAB EMR in 2017 and NIAB CEO in October 2021.
A computer scientist by training, Professor Caccamo has over 20 years’ experience in life science research and big data, including specific projects to apply the latest DNA sequencing technologies and bioinformatics methods to advance scientific understanding of crop genetics and the interaction of agricultural crops with their environment.
Professor Caccamo has led the work on the assembly of the first whole-genome release of the wheat reference sequence and was also one of the founding co-chairs of the expert working group within the Wheat Initiative focused on the deployment of an international Wheat Information System. Professor Caccamo continues with his leading role in the cereal bioinformatics communities at both national and international levels.
Meet Mario: NIAB's new CEO
Mario discusses his NIAB career to date, tells us what excites him about his new role, and explains his vision for NIAB over the next five years:
Current research projects
• Developing pangenomic bioinformatics approaches for cereal crops
• Gene annotation for crop pangenomes
Publications
Recent publications
• Ricardo H Ramirez-Gonzalez, Cristobal Uauy, Mario Caccamo (2015) PolyMarker: A fast polyploid primer design pipeline. Bioinformatics.
• KFX Mayer et al. (2014) A chromosome-based draft sequence of the hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) genome. Science.
• Richard M Leggett, Bernardo J Clavijo, Leah Clissold, Matthew D Clark, Mario Caccamo (2013). NextClip: an analysis and read preparation tool for Nextera long mate pair libraries. Bioinformatics.
• Mario Caccamo, Erich Grotewold (2013). Turning over a new leaf in plant genomics. Genome Biology.
• Zamin Iqbal, Mario Caccamo, Isaac Turner, Paul Flicek, Gil McVean (2012). De novo assembly and genotyping of variants using colored de Bruijn graphs. Nature Genetics
Full publication list on Google Scholar