Kia ora,

My name is Lesley,  I am a Dutch scientist who spend the majority of his life working on foundational evolutionary questions. My key interests lie in conservational genomics, understanding the mechanisms that drive speciation, and understanding pathogenic and symbiotic relationships between microbes and higher order organisms. 

I am a traditionally trained molecular biologist who learned bioinformatics about 10 years ago. Bioinformatics allow us to uncover genetic drivers and taxonomic markers much faster, and i see it as a perfect additional tool for any molecular biologist. 

In my most recent work I have looked at ancient DNA, DNA molecules extracted from archeological remains. These molecules tend to be fragmented and have high amounts of deaminated cytosines, creating some computational challenges. This work has resulted in some exciting findings regarding several human pathogens such as the Treponema pallidum and Mycobacterium lepromatosis. I’ve also developed a new tool called DamageMasker that “masks” deaminated cytosines from mapping data, so as to reduce the overal noise that damage adds to genotyping data.