Mark Robinson
Research Activities:
For the time being, I am following two rather disconnected research themes until I can decide on which project to follow for a Ph.D. thesis.First, I am relating Affymetrix microarray data (with RNA from human patient tumours) to outcome and other clinical parameters. There is a considerable interest in the field, both from the perspective of learning the biological mechanisms of the disease and from finding markers of prognosis. There are considerable challenges in doing this correctly (i.e. finding markers from noisy data that are reproducible) and, with scientists nowadays having considerable pressure to publish, a lot of markers that have been considered "significant" on one data set are failing to validate on another.
Second, I am researching the processing of quantitative proteomics data. By quantitative, I mean we are focusing on the LC-MS signal instead of, for example, the LC-MS/MS (tandem MS), that is commonly used for peptide identification. The intensities observed in the LC-MS are roughly linked to the concentration. Specifically, we are researching what is appropriate for background correction, alignment, normalization of multiple LC-MS runs. We are hoping our methods have equal application to GC-MS data, such as that collected in metabolomics research.
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