Richard J. Acton

Email: RichardJActon@gmail.com

DOB: 30/10/1992

POB: Scotland – UK

1 Current Position – MRC PhD Studentship (University of Southampton, 2016-19)

Project: Epigenomics of Human Ageing

Including examination of changes in tRNA gene methylation with Age and performing EWAS for Bone health outcomes.

Supervisor: Dr. Chris Bell C.G.Bell@soton.ac.uk

Project: Deletion, 2-hybrid vector creation and crystallography of the Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus Bd1483 gene.

Supervisors: Professor Liz Sockett liz.sockett@nottingham.ac.uk, Dr. Andy Lovering a.lovering@bham.ac.uk

Awarded With Distinction

Research Project subject: Differential Expression of circRNAs in daf-2 and daf-2/16 mutant C. elegans Neurons.

Supervisor: Irilenia Nobeli i.nobeli@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk

Awarded 1st Class with Honours Research Projects During this period:

2015 CRISPR based KO and screens of B methylase in the N6-methyladensine RNA modification system in Arabidopsis. (Supervisor: Dr. Rupert Fray rupert.fray@nottingham.ac.uk).
2014 BBSRC REP Summer project (See Section 2.1).
2013 Interactions of PilZ proteins of the Cyclic-dimeric-3’→5’-Guanosine Mono Phosphate (c-di-GMP) signalling system in Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus. (Supervisors Prof. Liz Sockett liz.sockett@nottingham.ac.uk)
2012 Summer project Identifying possible chlamydial effector protein genes and expressing in Human cell lines (Supervisor: Dr. Alan Huett Alan.Huett@nottingham.ac.uk)

(Photography taken as an extra-curricular in 2007, French taken 1 year early in 2008)

École Internationale de Genève (La Grande Boissière campus), from 2003-2005 (Switzerland, Geneva)
Cheddington Combined School 2000-2003 (UK)
Osgood Elementary 1999 – 2000 (USA, Massachusetts)
Cohasset Montessori 1997-1999 (USA, Massachusetts)
Bagshot Montessori 1996-1997 (UK)

Obligatory and facilitative allelic variation in the DNA methylome within common disease-associated loci, Nature Communications (2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01586-1 (journal-article)
Cancer detection and tissue of origin determination with novel annotation and scoring of cell-free methylated DNA, AME Medical Journal (2017) DOI: (10.21037/amj.2017.08.02)[http://amj.amegroups.com/article/view/3978/4686] (Comment)

(2019-01-16:17 - Advances at the interface between metabolism and epigenetics) Poster Presentation, Specific Isoacceptor and Isodecoder tRNA Genes Exhibit Increased DNA Methylation with Age.
(2018-11-21 – Institute of Developmental Sciences Review) Oral Presentation, Ageing-Associated DNA Hypermethylation in tRNA genetic loci.
(2018-01-31:02-02 - Healthy Ageing: From Molecules to Organisms) Lightning talk & Poster Presentation, Specific Isoacceptor and Isodecoder tRNA Genes Exhibit Increased DNA Methylation with Age.
(2017-11-14:17 - Epigenomics of Common Disease) Poster Presentation – 1st Poster Prize, Specific Isoacceptor and Isodecoder tRNA Genes Exhibit Increased DNA Methylation with Age.
(2017-11-08 - Institute of developmental sciences open day) Poster Presentation, Specific Isoacceptor and Isodecoder tRNA Genes Exhibit Increased DNA Methylation with Age.

(2017-11-29) QMUL, London Epigenetic Club meeting
(2017-06-05:07) Epigenetic Epidemiology Short Course (University of Bristol)
(2017-03-08:10) Clinical Epigenetics Society (CLEPSO) meeting (Düsseldorf)
(2017-03-03) London Epigenetics Club / London Chromatin Club joint meeting on Epigenetics and Metabolism
(2016-11-25) Research Data management Workshop (Southampton)
(2016-11-16) Galton institute conference (London)
(2016-11-01:04) Epigenomics of Common Diseases (Cambridge)

Bioinformatics & Computer Programming Skills

R, R is the language I use most day to day and I now have a high level of competence in this language and its ecosystem, such as RStudio, Rnotebooks, the ‘tidyverse’ packages and their philosophy for data manipulation along with data visualisation in ggplot2, and use of Bioconductor packages. I also have some experience with R package development and creation of interactive Shiny apps.
Perl5, Perl has the backronym ‘pathologically eclectic rubbish lister’ for a reason it is very useful at wrangling relatively unstructured data into structures that will play nice with R.
Linux systems, CLI / BASH scripting.
High performance computing clusters, I have experience using HPCs with SLURM, PBS/TORQUE schedulers.
Use of a variety of sequencing and array based analysis pipelines, most experienced with DNA methylation analysis pipelines.
Some familiarity with but not a regular user of:
- Python (and associated data science libraries such as Pandas, plotly, matplotlib, etc.)
- MySQL (Including Database design and creation)
- PHP
- CSS/HTML/javascript
- Perl6

‘Wet’ Lab Skills

Prior to switching emphasis to bioinformatics I acquired some experience with a variety of common ‘wet’ lab techniques including: Several forms of molecular cloning, DNA and RNA extraction and purification, PCR, acrylamide and agarose gel electrophoresis, basic chromatographic protein purification and hanging drop vapour diffusion crystallisation, and simple cell culture with transfection, staining and light microscopy.