Dr David Wragg
Bioinformatician/Statistical Geneticist

Contact details
Address
- Street
-
The Roslin Institute
Easter Bush Campus
Midlothian - City
- Post code
- EH25 9RG
Background
I spent 8 years in the civil service before completing a PhD in Genetics in 2013 at the University of Nottingham, focused on the genomic control of Mendelian traits in fancy and village chicken. A foundation of the thesis was mapping and unscrambling the causal mutation that gives rise to blue eggs in some chicken breeds. Since then I've studied endogenous retrovirus integration sites in chicken, signatures of selection in various livestock species, genetic diversity of honey bees, and gene expression cis-regulatory haplotypes in humans. I'm currently involved in a project at the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health (CTLGH), working on genetic tolerance to Theileria parva infection in cattle. T. parva is a parasite responsible for East Coast Fever - the single biggest killer of cattle across eastern, central and southern Africa, estimated to cause one death every 30 seconds. I'm a 'dry lab' scientist, so my research on genetics employs bioinformatics and statistical modeling.
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Whole-genome sequence data suggests environmental adaptation of Ethiopian sheep populations
In:
Genome Biology and Evolution
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evab014
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Digging into the genomic past of Swiss honey bees by whole-genome sequencing museum specimens
In:
Genome Biology and Evolution
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaa188
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
The wild species genome ancestry of domestic chickens
In:
BMC Biology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-0738-1
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Using regulatory variants to detect gene-gene interactions identifies networks of genes linked to cell immortalization
In:
Nature Communications, vol. 11
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13762-6
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Genome-wide scans identify known and novel regions associated with prolificacy and reproduction traits in a sub-Saharan African indigenous sheep (Ovis aries)
(14 pages)
In:
Mammalian Genome, vol. 30, pp. 339-352
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00335-019-09820-5
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Genome diversity and signatures of selection for production and performance traits in dromedary camels
In:
Frontiers in genetics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2019.00893
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Characterisation of the British honey bee metagenome
(13 pages)
In:
Nature Communications, vol. 9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07426-0
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Developing reduced SNP assays from whole-genome sequence data to estimate introgression in an organism with complex genetic patterns, the Iberian honeybee (Apis mellifera iberiensis)
In:
Evolutionary Applications, vol. 11, pp. 1270-1282
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/eva.12623
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Genomic signatures of adaptive introgression and environmental adaptation in the Sheko cattle of southwest Ethiopia
In:
PLoS ONE, vol. 13
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202479
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Autosomal and mitochondrial adaptation following admixture: a case study on the honeybees of Reunion Island.
In:
Genome Biology and Evolution, vol. 10, pp. 220-238
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evx247
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)