Professor Nicola Mulder
Affiliations
- Full Member, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine
- PI of H3ABioNet Bioinformatics Network
- PI of the DS-I Africa Open Data Science Platform
- Co-lead Sickle Cell Data Coordinating Centre
- Co-lead of the Wellcome Centre for Infectious Diseases Research in Africa (CIDRI-Africa) Data Integration Platform.
Key Expertise
Bioinformatics Genomic, Precision Medicine
Main Research Focus
The Computational Biology (CBIO) Division is the centre of Bioinformatics activities at the UCT. It performs world-class bioinformatics research and provides bioinformatics education, training and services. Nicola Mulder’s main research interests lie in the areas of genomics, including the development of tools and resources for African genomics and application to human diseases of relevance to Africa.
Pathogen Genomics: The group is working on pan genomes and graph-based approaches for the 1 analysis of human and pathogen genomes. It runs training on pathogen surveillance for the Africa CDC Pathogen Genomics Initiative through the NGS Academy.
African population genetics and diseases: The group has developed new algorithms and tools for the analysis of African genetic data. It has expertise in GWAS and population genetics and runs an imputation service for African researchers. It collaborates with researchers to use GWAS data to study the genetic determinants of disease. The group led H3ABioNet, the pan African bioinformatics network for H3Africa for 12 years. The network built capacity for genomics research in Africa and data standards and tools for the data. This work is continuing through the group's work on providing African genomics resources and the eLwazi Open Data Science Platform for the DS-I Africa consortium.
Microbiomes: The group works with collaborators to analyse microbiome data related to various diseases. It has developed containerized workflows for this analysis as well as for the analysis of whole genome shotgun metagenomics data. It has also developed a new tool for the analysis of metaproteomic data.
Bioinformatics tools and support: CBIO provides bioinformatics services to other researchers in the Institute and beyond. It has developed workflows for genomics-related data analysis, including GWAS, NGS and variant calling, RNASeq, 16S rRNA analysis, and WGS metagenomics, and develops new algorithms and visualisation tools. Through the DS-I Africa Open Data Science Platform, the group provides access to data, tools and computing environments.
Bioinformatics training: The group runs an extensive bioinformatics training program to build capacity across the continent. It trains bioinformaticians as well as researchers who need to use bioinformatics in their work.
Most Significant Paper Authored in 2024
Brooksbank, C., Brazas, M. D., Mulder, N., Schwartz, R., Ras, V., Morgan, S. L., Lloret Llinares, M., Carvajal López, P., Larcombe, L., Ghouila, A., Hancocks, T., Satagopam, V., De Las Rivas, J., Mazandu, G., & Gaeta, B. (2024)
This paper describes work that we have done as a community of Bioinformatics trainers to unpack the requirements for developing bioinformatics competencies. The demand for bioinformatics skills is enormous but training requires a carefully thought out approach that should be relevant to a person’s background and research needs. The competency framework provides a tool for designing bioinformatics training and education that will provide trainees with the appropriate skills and knowledge for their needs.