The Lunter group is particularly interested in understanding the regulatory genome by building machine learning models that predict intermediate phenotypes from DNA sequence. They use these models to predict whether mutations disrupt regulatory machinery or create cryptic functional sites, and try to understand how these models predict phenotype to possibly discover new biology.
Originally from the Netherlands, Prof Lunter did his PhD in mathematics at the University of Groningen. He has since worked in several departments at the University of Oxford, including the Department of Statistics, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, where he established his group in 2009. Talking about his move to the MRC WIMM Centre for Computational Biology, Prof Lunter said, "I'm excited to join the MRC WIMM, which is host to an exciting combination of world-class and focused research in computational and molecular biology, and I look forward to setting up collaborations to better understand the great puzzle of our time, the regulatory genome".
Prof Lunter is joined in our institute by his group members Richard Brown, Dan Cooke and Chris Cole. With Jim Hughes he co-supervises Ron Schwessinger and Ravza Gür who are already based at the MRC WIMM.