My Research & Papers

From 2008 till 2011, I completed a PhD in Assoc. Prof Timothy Bailey's group at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, at The University of Queensland, Australia. This focused on developing tools and methods to better under transcription factor binding and gene expression. One key focus of my PhD was on integrating epigenetic (and particularly, histone modification) data into in silico methods of predicting transcription factor binding. This both greatly improves accuracy (less false positives), and allows these methods to be tissue-specific.

Following this, until 2019, I was undertaking research and development for a start-up company that co-founded, DoseMe Pty Ltd, producing a software product that more accurately assists in determining the individually optimum dose of a given drug to give to a patient to reach a desired therapeutic range. We predominantly gave talks and published posters at conferences all over the world. Since DoseMe was acquired in 2019, and throughout the time of DoseMe's journey I also published the odd paper in bioinformatics as well.

You can view a list of papers and posters I have published and presented below. I also link to software tools developed in these posters. My PhD thesis is also available for download.

Papers:

PhD Thesis:

  • McLeay RC. Predicting Tissue-Specific Transcription Factor Binding and Gene Expression in silico. 2011. Abstract | Full Thesis

Recent Notable Posters:

Software Tools on External Sites:

  • AME & RAMEN - Motif enrichment analysis. Find transcription factor motifs over-represented in a set of genes. AME is now maintained in the MEME Suite, and porting RAMEN is in progress.
  • DR Gene - Identify promoters bound by a given transcription factor in a tissue-specific manner (i.e. find Directly Regulated Genes).
  • WigShrink - Reduce the size of a "wiggle" file by removing unnecessary runs of zeros.
  • Genome-wide gene expression modelling - Supplementary data and scripts for gene expression modelling (for a submitted paper).