Associate Professor Paul Gardner
Position | Associate Professor |
---|---|
Department | Department of Biochemistry |
Qualifications | BSc(Hons) PhD |
Research
The three main research strands of our group lie in (1) RNA Biology, particularly the functional characterisation of non-coding RNAs, and more recently in the impact of promiscuous RNA:RNA interactions on translation. (2) the analysis of genome variation, in particular the identification of functionally significant and convergent evolutionary signals that indicate variation of phenotypic importance. We have also used high density transposon mutagenesis and comparative genomics to characterise genomic regions of functional importance. (3) The continual evaluation and improvement of bioinformatic tools is necessary for the field to progress and to help researchers identify the right tools for their questions. We use a range of methods, including benchmarking, curation of positive and negative control datasets and meta-analysis and meta-science based approaches to find where methodological progress can be made.

For more details, see our Lab’s homepage.
Funding
Our research is funded by generous support from a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, MBIE Smart Ideas, The Marsden Fund, The Bio-Protection CoRE and The Biomolecular Interaction Centre.
Publications
Cooper, H. B., Krause, K. L., & Gardner, P. P. (2023). Finding priority bacterial ribosomes for future structural and antimicrobial research based upon global RNA and protein sequence analysis. PeerJ, 11, e14969. doi: 10.7717/peerj.14969
Gardner, P. P., Paterson, J. M., McGimpsey, S., Ashari-Ghomi, F., Umu, S. U., Pawlik, A., Gavryushkin, A., & Black, M. A. (2022). Sustained software development, not number of citations or journal choice, is indicative of accurate bioinformatic software. Genome Biology, 23, 56. doi: 10.1186/s13059-022-02625-x
Bhandari, B. K., Lim, C. S., Remus, D. M., Chen, A., van Dolleweerd, C., & Gardner, P. P. (2021). Analysis of 11,430 recombinant protein production experiments reveals that protein yield is tunable by synonymous codon changes of translation initiation sites. PLoS Computational Biology, 17(10), e1009461. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009461
Smith, L. M., Jackson, S. A., Gardner, P. P., & Fineran, P. C. (2021). SorTn-seq: A high-throughput functional genomics approach to discovering regulators of bacterial gene expression. Nature Protocols, 16, 4382-4418. doi: 10.1038/s41596-021-00582-6
Sitter, T. L., Vaughan, A. L., Schoof, M., Jackson, S. A., Glare, T. R., Cox, M. P., Fineran, P. C., Gardner, P. P., & Hurst, M. R. H. (2021). Evolution of virulence in a novel family of transmissible mega-plasmids. Environmental Microbiology, 23(9), 5289-5304. doi: 10.1111/1462-2920.15595
Barquist, L., Burge, S. W., & Gardner, P. P. (2016). Studying RNA homology and conservation with infernal: From single sequences to RNA families. In A. Bateman, S. Draghici, E. Khurana, S. Orchard & W. R. Pearson (Eds.), Current protocols in bioinformatics. (pp. 12.13.1-12.13.25). Wiley. doi: 10.1002/cpbi.4
Chapter in Book - Research
Hertel, J., Fasold, M., Nitsche, A., Erb, I., Prieto, P., Kedra, D., … Gardner, P. P., & Stadler, P. F. (2015). Noncoding RNAs in the chicken genome. In M. Schmid, J. Smith & D. W. Burt (Eds.), Third report on chicken genes and chromosomes 2015. (pp. 89-91). Basel, Switzerland: Karger. doi: 10.1159/isbn.978-3-318-05569-6
Chapter in Book - Research
Bollback, J. P., Gardner, P. P., & Nielsen, R. (2007). Estimating the history of mutations on a phylogeny. In D. A. Liberles (Ed.), Ancestral sequence reconstruction. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299188.003.0006
Chapter in Book - Research
Cooper, H. B., Krause, K. L., & Gardner, P. P. (2023). Finding priority bacterial ribosomes for future structural and antimicrobial research based upon global RNA and protein sequence analysis. PeerJ, 11, e14969. doi: 10.7717/peerj.14969
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., Paterson, J. M., McGimpsey, S., Ashari-Ghomi, F., Umu, S. U., Pawlik, A., Gavryushkin, A., & Black, M. A. (2022). Sustained software development, not number of citations or journal choice, is indicative of accurate bioinformatic software. Genome Biology, 23, 56. doi: 10.1186/s13059-022-02625-x
Journal - Research Article
Bhandari, B. K., Lim, C. S., & Gardner, P. P. (2021). TISIGNER.com: Web services for improving recombinant protein production. Nucleic Acids Research, 49, W654-W661. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkab175
Journal - Research Article
Bhandari, B. K., Lim, C. S., Remus, D. M., Chen, A., van Dolleweerd, C., & Gardner, P. P. (2021). Analysis of 11,430 recombinant protein production experiments reveals that protein yield is tunable by synonymous codon changes of translation initiation sites. PLoS Computational Biology, 17(10), e1009461. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009461
Journal - Research Article
Sitter, T. L., Vaughan, A. L., Schoof, M., Jackson, S. A., Glare, T. R., Cox, M. P., Fineran, P. C., Gardner, P. P., & Hurst, M. R. H. (2021). Evolution of virulence in a novel family of transmissible mega-plasmids. Environmental Microbiology, 23(9), 5289-5304. doi: 10.1111/1462-2920.15595
Journal - Research Article
Smith, L. M., Jackson, S. A., Malone, L. M., Ussher, J. E., Gardner, P. P., & Fineran, P. C. (2021). The Rcs stress response inversely controls surface and CRISPR–Cas adaptive immunity to discriminate plasmids and phages. Nature Microbiology, 6, 162-172. doi: 10.1038/s41564-020-00822-7
Journal - Research Article
Bhandari, B. K., Gardner, P. P., & Lim, C. S. (2020). Solubility-Weighted Index: Fast and accurate prediction of protein solubility. Bioinformatics, 36(18), 4691-4698. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa578
Journal - Research Article
Biggs, H., Parthasarathy, P., Gavryushkina, A., & Gardner, P. P. (2020). ncVarDB: A manually curated database for pathogenic non-coding variants and benign controls. Database, baaa105. doi: 10.1093/database/baaa105
Journal - Research Article
Gemmell, N. J., Rutherford, K., Prost, S., Tollis, M., Winter, D., Macey, J. R., … Gardner, P. P., … Hore, T. A., … Dussex, N., Taylor, H., Abe, H., Bond, D. M., … Ngatiwai Trust Board. (2020). The tuatara genome reveals ancient features of amniote evolution. Nature, 584, 403-409. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2561-9
Journal - Research Article
Malone, L. M., Warring, S. L., Jackson, S. A., Warnecke, C., Gardner, P. P., Gumy, L. F., & Fineran, P. C. (2020). A jumbo phage that forms a nucleus-like structure evades CRISPR-Cas DNA targeting but is vulnerable to type III RNA-based immunity. Nature Microbiology, 5, 48-55. doi: 10.1038/s41564-019-0612-5
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., Watson, R. J., Morgan, X. C., Draper, J. L., Finn, R. D., Morales, S. E., & Stott, M. B. (2019). Identifying accurate metagenome and amplicon software via a meta-analysis of sequence to taxonomy benchmarking studies. PeerJ, 7, e6160 . doi: 10.7717/peerj.6160
Journal - Research Article
Sackton, T. B., Grayson, P., Cloutier, A., Hu, Z., Liu, J. S., Wheeler, N. E., Gardner, P. P., … Edwards, S. V. (2019). Convergent regulatory evolution and loss of flight in paleognathous birds. Science, 364(6435), 74-78. doi: 10.1126/science.aat7244
Journal - Research Article
Wheeler, N. E., Blackmore, T., Reynolds, A. D., Midwinter, A. C., Marshall, J., French, N. P., … Gardner, P. P., & Biggs, P. J. (2019). Genomic correlates of extraintestinal infection are linked with changes in cell morphology in Campylobacter jejuni. Microbial Genomics, 5(2), 1-12. doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000251
Journal - Research Article
Wheeler, N. E., Gardner, P. P., & Barquist, L. (2018). Machine learning identifies signatures of host adaptation in the bacterial pathogen Salmonella enterica. PLoS Genetics, 14(5), e1007333. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1007333
Journal - Research Article
Umu, S. U., & Gardner, P. P. (2017). A comprehensive benchmark of RNA-RNA interaction prediction tools for all domains of life. Bioinformatics, 33(7), 988-996. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw728
Journal - Research Article
Lindgreen, S., Adair, K. L., & Gardner, P. P. (2016). An evaluation of the accuracy and speed of metagenome analysis tools. Scientific Reports, 6, 19233 . doi: 10.1038/srep19233
Journal - Research Article
Umu, S. U., Poole, A. M., Dobson, R. C. J., & Gardner, P. P. (2016). Avoidance of stochastic RNA interactions can be harnessed to control protein expression levels in bacteria and archaea. eLIFE, 5, e13479. doi: 10.7554/eLife.13479
Journal - Research Article
Wheeler, N. E., Barquist, L., Kingsley, R. A., & Gardner, P. P. (2016). A profile-based method for identifying functional divergence of orthologous genes in bacterial genomes. Bioinformatics, 32(23), 3566-3574. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btw518
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., & Eldai, H. (2015). Annotating RNA motifs in sequences and alignments. Nucleic Acids Research, 43(2), 691-698. doi: 10.1093/nar/gku1327
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., Fasold, M., Burge, S. W., Ninova, M., Hertel, J., Kehr, S., … Stadler, P. F. (2015). Conservation and losses of non-coding RNAs in avian genomes. PLoS ONE, 10(3), e0121797. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0121797
Journal - Research Article
Nawrocki, E. P., Burge, S. W., Bateman, A., Daub, J., Eberhardt, R. Y., Eddy, S. R., … Gardner, P. P., … Finn, R. D. (2015). Rfam 12.0: Updates to the RNA families database. Nucleic Acids Research, 43(D1), D130-D137. doi: 10.1093/nar/gku1063
Journal - Research Article
Lindgreen, S., Umu, S. U., Lai, A. S.-W., Eldai, H., Liu, W., McGimpsey, S., … Gardner, P. P. (2014). Robust identification of noncoding RNA from transcriptomes requires phylogenetically-informed sampling. PLoS Computational Biology, 10(10), e1003907. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003907
Journal - Research Article
Tang, Y., Nielsen, H., Masquida, B., Gardner, P. P., & Johansen, S. D. (2014). Molecular characterization of a new member of the lariat capping twin-ribozyme introns. Mobile DNA, 5, 25. doi: 10.1186/1759-8753-5-25
Journal - Research Article
Zhang, G., Li, C., Li, Q., Li, B., Larkin, D. M., Lee, C., … Avian Genome Consortium, including Gardner, P. P., … Wang, J. (2014). Comparative genomics reveals insights into avian genome evolution and adaptation. Science, 346(6215), 1311-1320. doi: 10.1126/science.1251385
Journal - Research Article
Barquist, L., Langridge, G. C., Turner, D. J., Phan, M.-D., Turner, A. K., Bateman, A., … Gardner, P. P. (2013). A comparison of dense transposon insertion libraries in the Salmonella serovars Typhi and Typhimurium. Nucleic Acids Research, 41(8), 4549-4564. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkt148
Journal - Research Article
Burge, S. W., Daub, J., Eberhardt, R., Tate, J., Barquist, L., Nawrocki, E. P., … Gardner, P. P., & Bateman, A. (2013). Rfam 11.0: 10 years of RNA families. Nucleic Acids Research, 41(D1), D226-D232. doi: 10.1093/nar/gks1005
Journal - Research Article
Kingsley, R. A., Kay, S., Connor, T., Barquist, L., Sait, L., Holt, K. E., … Gardner, P. P., … Dougan, G. (2013). Genome and transcriptome adaptation accompanying emergence of the definitive type 2 host-restricted Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium pathovar. mBio, 4(5), e00565-13. doi: 10.1128/mBio.00565-13
Journal - Research Article
Hoeppner, M. P., Gardner, P. P., & Poole, A. M. (2012). Comparative analysis of RNA families reveals distinct repertoires for each domain of life. PLoS Computational Biology, 8(11), e1002752. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002752
Journal - Research Article
Widmann, J., Stombaugh, J., McDonald, D., Chocholousova, J., Gardner, P., Iyer, M. K., … Knight, R. (2012). RNASTAR: An RNA STructural Alignment Repository that provides insight into the evolution of natural and artificial RNAs. RNA, 18(7), 1319-1327. doi: 10.1261/rna.032052.111
Journal - Research Article
Chaudhuri, R. R., Yu, L., Kanji, A., Perkins, T. T., Gardner, P. P., Choudhary, J., … Grant, A. J. (2011). Quantitative RNA-seq analysis of the campylobacter jejuni transcriptome. Microbiology, 157(10), 2922-2932. doi: 10.1099/mic.0.050278-0
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., Barquist, L., Bateman, A., Nawrocki, E. P., & Weinberg, Z. (2011). RNIE: Genome-wide prediction of bacterial intrinsic terminators. Nucleic Acids Research, 39(14), 5845-5852. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkr168
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., Daub, J., Tate, J., Moore, B. L., Osuch, I. H., Griffiths-Jones, S., … Bateman, A. (2011). Rfam: Wikipedia, clans and the "decimal" release. Nucleic Acids Research, 39(Suppl. 1), D141-D145. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkq1129
Journal - Research Article
Nygaard, S., Braunstein, A., Malsen, G., Van Dongen, S., Gardner, P. P., Krogh, A., … Jeffares, D. C. (2010). Long- and short-term selective forces on malaria parasite genomes. PLoS Genetics, 6(9), e1001099. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1001099
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., Daub, J., Tate, J. G., Nawrocki, E. P., Kolbe, D. L., Lindgreen, S., … Bateman, A. (2009). Rfam: Updates to the RNA families database. Nucleic Acids Research, 37(Suppl. 1), D136-D140. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkn766
Journal - Research Article
Perkins, T. T., Kingsley, R. A., Fookes, M. C., Gardner, P. P., James, K. D., Yu, L., … Dougan, G. (2009). A strand-specific RNA-seq analysis of the transcriptome of the typhoid bacillus Salmonella typhi. PLoS Genetics, 5(7), e1000569. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000569
Journal - Research Article
Mourier, T., Carret, C., Kyes, S., Christodoulou, Z., Gardner, P. P., Jeffares, D. C., … Pain, A. (2008). Genome-wide discovery and verification of novel structured RNAs in Plasmodium falciparum. Genome Research, 18(2), 281-292. doi: 10.1101/gr.6836108
Journal - Research Article
Freyhult, E. K., Bollback, J. P., & Gardner, P. P. (2007). Exploring genomic dark matter: A critical assessment of the performance of homology search methods on noncoding RNA. Genome Research, 17(1), 117-125. doi: 10.1101/gr.5890907
Journal - Research Article
Lindgreen, S., Gardner, P. P., & Krogh, A. (2007). MASTR: Multiple alignment and structure prediction of non-coding RNAs using simulated annealing. Bioinformatics, 23(24), 3304-3311. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btm525
Journal - Research Article
Weiler, C., Gardner, P. P., Hedegaard, M. M., & Vinther, J. (2007). Use of tiling array data and RNA secondary structure predictions to identify noncoding RNA genes. BMC Genomics, 8, 244. doi: 10.1186/1471-2164-8-244
Journal - Research Article
Lindgreen, S., Gardner, P. P., & Krogh, A. (2006). Measuring covariation in RNA alignments: Physical realism improves information measures. Bioinformatics, 22(24), 2988-2995. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btl514
Journal - Research Article
Freyhult, E., Gardner, P. P., & Moulton, V. (2005). A comparison of RNA folding measures. BMC Bioinformatics, 6, 241. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-6-241
Journal - Research Article
Freyhult, E., Moulton, V., & Gardner, P. (2005). Predicting RNA structure using mutual information. Applied Bioinformatics, 4(1), 53-59. doi: 10.2165/00822942-200504010-00006
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., Wilm, A., & Washietl, S. (2005). A benchmark of multiple sequence alignment programs upon structural RNAs. Nucleic Acids Research, 33(8), 2433-2439. doi: 10.1093/nar/gki541
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., & Giegerich, R. (2004). A comprehensive comparison of comparative RNA structure prediction approaches. BMC Bioinformatics, 5, 140. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-5-140
Journal - Research Article
Edvardsson, S., Gardner, P. P., Poole, A. M., Hendy, M. D., Penny, D., & Moulton, V. (2003). A search for H/ACA snoRNAs in yeast using MFE secondary structure prediction. Bioinformatics, 19(7), 865-873. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btg080
Journal - Research Article
Gardner, P. P., Holland, B. R., Moulton, V., Hendy, M., & Penny, D. (2003). Optimal alphabets for an RNA world. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series B, 270(1520), 1177-1182. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2003.2355
Journal - Research Article
Rakonjac, J., Ward, L. J. H., Schiemann, A. H., Gardner, P. P., Lubbers, M. W., & O'Toole, P. W. (2003). Sequence diversity and functional conservation of the origin of replication in lactococcal prolate phages. Applied & Environmental Microbiology, 69(9), 5104-5114. doi: 10.1128/AEM.69.9.5104-5114.2003
Journal - Research Article
Buchka, S., Hapfelmeier, A., Gardner, P. P., Wilson, R., & Boulesteix, A. (2021). On the optimistic performance evaluation of newly introduced bioinformatic methods [Short report]. Genome Biology, 22(1). doi: 10.1186/s13059-021-02365-4
Journal - Research Other
Smith, L. M., Jackson, S. A., Gardner, P. P., & Fineran, P. C. (2021). SorTn-seq: A high-throughput functional genomics approach to discovering regulators of bacterial gene expression. Nature Protocols, 16, 4382-4418. doi: 10.1038/s41596-021-00582-6
Journal - Research Other
da Fonseca, R. R., Couto, A., Machado, A. M., Brejova, B., Albertin, C. B., Silva, F., Gardner, P., … Gilbert, M. T. P. (2020). A draft genome sequence of the elusive giant squid, Architeuthis dux [Data note]. GigaScience, 9(1), giz152. doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giz152
Journal - Research Other
Jose, B. R., Gardner, P. P., & Barquist, L. (2019). Transcriptional noise and exaptation as sources for bacterial sRNAs. Biochemical Society Transactions, 47(2), 527-539. doi: 10.1042/bst20180171
Journal - Research Other
Weber, L. M., Saelens, W., Cannoodt, R., Soneson, C., Hapfelmeier, A., Gardner, P. P., … Robinson, M. D. (2019). Essential guidelines for computational method benchmarking. Genome Biology, 20(1), 125. doi: 10.1186/s13059-019-1738-8
Journal - Research Other
Dickie, I. A., Boyer, S., Buckley, H., Duncan, R. P., Gardner, P., Hogg, I. D., … Morales, S. E., … Weaver, L. (2018). Towards robust and repeatable sampling methods in eDNA based studies. Molecular Ecology Resources, 18(5), 940-952. doi: 10.1111/1755-0998.12907
Journal - Research Other
Coray, D., Wheeler, N. E., Heinemann, J. A., & Gardner, P. P. (2017). Why so narrow: Distribution of anti-sense regulated, type I toxin-antitoxin systems compared with type II and type III systems. RNA Biology, 14(3), 275-280. doi: 10.1080/15476286.2016.1272747
Journal - Research Other
Finn, R. D., Gardner, P. P., & Bateman, A. (2012). Making your database available through Wikipedia: The pros and cons. Nucleic Acids Research, 40(D1), D9-D12. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkr1195
Journal - Research Other
Gardner, P. P. (2012). Three years of RNA families. RNA Biology, 9(1), 2-3. doi: 10.4161/rna.9.1.18979
Journal - Research Other
Bateman, A., Agrawal, S., Birney, E., Bruford, E. A., Bujnicki, J. M., Cochrane, G., … Gardner, P. P., … Zwieb, C. (2011). RNAcentral: A vision for an international database of RNA sequences. RNA, 17(11), 1941-1946. doi: 10.1261/rna.2750811
Journal - Research Other
Gardner, P. P., Bateman, A., & Poole, A. M. (2010). SnoPatrol: How many snoRNA genes are there? Journal of Biology, 9(1), 4. doi: 10.1186/jbiol211
Journal - Research Other
Logan, D. W., Sandal, M., Gardner, P. P., Manske, M., & Bateman, A. (2010). Ten simple rules for editing wikipedia. PLoS Computational Biology, 6(9), e1000941. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000941
Journal - Research Other
Gardner, P. P. (2009). The use of covariance models to annotate RNAs in whole genomes. Briefings in Functional Genomics, 8(6), 444-450. doi: 10.1093/bfgp/elp042
Journal - Research Other
Gardner, P. P., & Bateman, A. G. (2009). A home for RNA families at RNA Biology. RNA Biology, 6(1), 2-4. doi: 10.4161/rna.6.1.7635
Journal - Research Other
Daub, J., Gardner, P. P., Tate, J., Ramsköld, D., Manske, M., Scott, W. G., … Bateman, A. (2008). The RNA WikiProject: Community annotation of RNA families. RNA, 14(12), 2462-2464. doi: 10.1261/rna.1200508
Journal - Research Other
Gardner, P. P., & Vinther, J. (2008). Mutation of miRNA target sequences during human evolution. Trends in Genetics, 24(6), 262-265. doi: 10.1016/j.tig.2008.03.009
Journal - Research Other
Munch, K., Gardner, P. P., Arctander, P., & Krogh, A. (2006). A hidden Markov model approach for determining expression from genomic tiling micro arrays. BMC Bioinformatics, 7, 239. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-7-239
Journal - Research Other
Vinther, J., Hedegaard, M. M., Gardner, P. P., Andersen, J. S., & Arctander, P. (2006). Identification of miRNA targets with stable isotope labeling by amino acids in cell culture. Nucleic Acids Research, 34(16), e107. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkl590
Journal - Research Other
Moulton, V., Gardner, P. P., Pointon, R. F., Creamer, L. K., & Jameson, G. B. (2000). RNA folding argues against a hot-start origin of life. Journal of Molecular Evolution, 51(4), 416-421. doi: 10.1007/s002390010104
Journal - Research Other