Secondment from Milano (IT) to Boyce Thompson Institute, NY (US)

During the secondment, James Friel, a researcher from University of Milano (IT) first visited Cornell university (NY) to work in Dr. Strickler’s computational biology lab. There they collected leaf tissue from Pawpaw cultivars growing in an experimental orchard and sent some additional material for Hifi and Hi-C sequencing. After this he travelled to Prof. Haak’s lab in Virginia Tech, (VA) to prepare the genotype-by-sequencing analysis (GBS) libraries from the wild and cultivated varieties. Once the those were completed and send for sequencing he returned to Cornell where he performed an RNA extraction from various Asimina triloba tissue types and sent the RNA for sequencing. During his time in the Strickler lab he learned about genome assembly using the Hifi and chromosome scaffolding with Hi-C data, how to annotate a genome using RNA-seq data. Before returning to Milan, he presented his work to the Boyce Thompson Institute, Cornell.