Episode 53: Building Better Bacterial Genomes

In this episode, Dr. Ryan Wick discusses the path that led him into bioinformatics and the technologies that have shaped his work in bacterial genomics. Dr. Wick shares how an early interest in biology evolved through careers in healthcare software and science education into a passion for programming and computational biology. He explains how that journey led to the development of a tool that helps scientists visualize genome assembly graphs, and later a hybrid assembler that combines short- and long-read sequencing data to create complete bacterial genome assemblies. Dr. Wick also explores how advances in next-generation sequencing, machine learning, and bioinformatics algorithms have improved the accuracy and accessibility of genome assembly.