Ms Lauren Bragg: developing analysis pipelines for large biological datasets

Ms Lauren Bragg is a bioinformatician with experience in developing pipelines for analysis of genomic data.

5 December 2007 | Updated 3 May 2012

Current activities
Background
Academic qualifications

Current activities

Ms Lauren Bragg is a bioinformatician working in the Statistical Bioinformatics Health Stream within CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences Division.

Ms Bragg uses her computer programming, statistical and biological knowledge to develop analytical pipelines for data from a variety of biological sources.

An analytical pipeline is a series of processes by which data is prepared and then analysed to produce useful information.

Ms Bragg has been integrating data from various biological experiments and genomics resources to assist biologists in their understanding of complex biological systems.

Current projects aim to measure at a molecular level bacterial genes in various environments, such as soil and the human gut.

Within the Preventative Health Flagship Ms Bragg has been assisting researchers to evaluate molecular comparisons between the human and rat colon.

This is part of a greater effort to understand the similarities between the species in the development of colon cancers and to identify early markers of colon cancer in humans.

Markers discovered by this project are currently being evaluated in the laboratory.

Ms Bragg has also been part of the CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences research effort to develop novel sequence space microarray platforms.

The Vertebrate Array is a novel biotechnology platform that will allow researchers working on organisms (preferably vertebrates) with no current genome sequence to perform informative microarray experiments.

Current technology has allowed the researchers to create an array with 1.3 million oligonucleotides (short sequences of nucleotides) for hybridisation of mRNA (Messenger Ribonucleic Acid).

Ms Bragg’s current research is concerned with extending ideas developed within the Vertebrate Array project.

Current projects aim to measure at a molecular level bacterial genes in various environments, such as soil and the human gut.

Background

Ms Bragg joined CSIRO in 2007 as a Bioinformatician.

Prior to joining CSIRO she worked as a software developer for Capital Markets Surveillance Services (CMSS), a project run by the Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre (CRC).