Dr. Andres S. Espindola is an Assistant professor at the Department of
Entomology and Plant Pathology and the Institute for Biosecurity and Microbial
Forensics (IBMF) at Oklahoma State University. His background includes
computational and molecular biology. His work focuses on developing
bioinformatic and molecular tools to detect plant pathogen in high throughput
data. He is the lead developer of Microbe Finder (MiFi), a graphical user
interface that is used to create and validate e-probes for the detection of
pathogens in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) data. MiFi has been used to
evaluate e-probes for Citrus, Poaceae, Roses, Blueberries, Pomes and a variety
of regulated pathogens on multiple hosts. Additionally, his research has been
instrumental to develop protocols that increase pathogen availability in HTS
libraries, ultimately increasing HTS sensitivity in detection using Target
Specific Reverse Primer Pools (TASPERT). He is also actively working on
computational modeling to predict crop productivity and pathogen detection. He
has extensive experience analyzing, genomic, transcriptomic and metagenomic big
data from long and short read HTS platforms. By using HTS their aim is to
develop the appropriate protocols to detect any pathogen in any plant sample.
Currently, he is using Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) minION sequencer to
validate portability of sequencing devices for diagnostics.
