Professor Mario Caccamo

Chief Executive
01223 342430

Responsibilities

Professor Mario Caccamo was appointed as the Head of Crop Bioinformatics at NIAB in 2015, Managing Director of NIAB EMR in 2017 and NIAB CEO in October 2021.

A computer scientist by training, Mario has over 20 years’ experience in life science research and big data, including specific projects to apply the latest DNA sequencing technologies and bioinformatics methods to advance scientific understanding of crop genetics and the interaction of agricultural crops with their environment.

Mario has led the work on the assembly of the first whole-genome release of the wheat reference sequence and was also one of the founding co-chairs of the expert working group within the Wheat Initiative focused on the deployment of an international Wheat Information System. He continues with his leading role in the cereal bioinformatics communities at both national and international levels.

Meet Mario: NIAB's CEO

Mario discusses his NIAB career to date, tells us what excites him about his role, and explains his vision for NIAB over the next five years:

Current research projects

Developing pangenomic bioinformatics approaches for cereal crops
Gene annotation for crop pangenomes

Recent publications

• Ricardo H Ramirez-Gonzalez, Cristobal Uauy, Mario Caccamo (2015) PolyMarker: A fast polyploid primer design pipeline. Bioinformatics.
• KFX Mayer et al. (2014) A chromosome-based draft sequence of the hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) genome. Science.
• Richard M Leggett, Bernardo J Clavijo, Leah Clissold, Matthew D Clark, Mario Caccamo (2013). NextClip: an analysis and read preparation tool for Nextera long mate pair libraries. Bioinformatics.
Mario Caccamo, Erich Grotewold (2013). Turning over a new leaf in plant genomics. Genome Biology.
• Zamin Iqbal, Mario Caccamo, Isaac Turner, Paul Flicek, Gil McVean (2012). De novo assembly and genotyping of variants using colored de Bruijn graphs. Nature Genetics

Full publication list on Google Scholar