Max Carter-Brown

Max joined ARU in November 2023 and is a member of the Ecology, Evolution, and the Environment Research Centre.

From 2020 to 2021, Max worked as a Senior Bioinformatician at the Wellcome Sanger Research Institute on the Darwin Tree of Life project, which aims to sequence the genome (all the DNA!) of every eukaryote in Great Britain and Ireland. Here, Max worked on bioinformatics pipelines and software to process the large amounts of data flowing through the project. Max also worked on plant genomics, in particular the assembly of complex plant mitochondria, and apple tree population genomics.

During Max’s PhD and beyond, he has collaborated with many institutions, including the Royal Botanical Gardens Edinburgh (RGBE), Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, and Cambridge Botanical Gardens. He is a research associate at both RGBE, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Max’s research interests include:

- Repeat content in eukaryotic genomes (telomeres, centromeres, and transposable elements)
- Host-parasite intereactions in parasitic plants
- Plant mitochondrial genome structure and diversity
- Plant somatic mutation genomics (across age, taxa, and contaminants)