Wellcome Sanger Institute

During my undergraduate degree, I did a placement year at the Wellcome Sanger Institute: a research institute at the forefront of genomics research.

In between the second and third years of my degree at the University of Bristol, I worked as an industrial placement student at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

I worked under Prof Panos Deloukas in the Sanger Genotyping Platform Group (Team 67). We used the illumina MasArray genotyping platform and I spent most of my time validating variants using the Sequenom MassArray platform. This gave confidence about sample identity in the large scale projects that we were running.

The day-to-day lab work involved a lot of high-throughput genomics lab work. I ran thousands of PCR reaction plates, became very familiar with different type of Taq enzyme and spent a lot of time pipetting. In addition to this, I also worked with the robotics platforms and some analysis work.

I was lucky enough to be involved in several papers coming out of the group, including a Nature Genetics paper in 2007 and a 2008 study on tracing Salmonella enterica spread using genetic varation.