Blake Meyers

The Meyers Lab’s work with next-gen sequencing stretches back to ~2001, when Blake was funded by the NSF to apply “MPSS” to the analysis of gene expression in Arabidopsis. This led to the development in the Meyers lab of the first publicly-accessible browser for next-gen data. After moving to the University of Delaware in 2002, we continued to develop the application to mRNA and small RNA analyses of first MPSS, then 454, and finally the still-current Illumina SBS sequencing.

In 2005, with collaborator Pam Green, we were the first to use next-gen sequencing for the analysis of small RNAs, and in 2008, our labs co-developed “PARE” for the genome-wide analysis of cleaved mRNAs (PARE = Parallel Analysis of RNA Ends). The Meyers lab has widely applied these methods to study plant genomes and their RNA products, and the lab continues to develop and apply novel informatics approaches for the analysis of RNA function in plants.