Pilot Project
Pilot committee
AfricaBP Pilot Committee will initiate, expand, and coordinate the ethical, multi-national and multi-institutional collaborations to sequence 2500 priority species of economic, ecological, scientific, and cultural importance across the African continent and associated islands over the next three years. Through the efforts of its eight Sub-Committees (listed below), it will provide the scientific, legal, and logistic foundation vital for large-scale genomics studies while exploring the many challenges and opportunities the full-scale project will pose.
Chairs
Zahra Mungloo-Dilmohamud currently works at the Department of Digital Technologies at the University of Mauritius. Her research interests are Bioinformatics - Genomics and Transcriptomics, Health Informatics, Application of Machine Learning and Deep Learning in Bioinformatics/Health. One of her main projects is 'Robustness of biomarker discovery in gene-expression data.'
Dr. Sharaf is a senior bioinformatician at Biology Centre ASCR, Czech Republic, and an associate professor at Ain Shams University, Egypt. His current research interest focused on the investigation of the origin of the Polycomb Repressive Complex (PRC) 2 in Eukaryotes leading to the evolution of epigenetic chromatin modifications in evolutionary lineages. Moreover, his research focuses on comparative genomics and genome evolution of unicellular organisms hypothesized to be proximal to the root of eukaryotic supergroups. His experiences involved de novo and hybrid genome assembly between the short- and long-read sequencing technologies.