Dr Jake TM Pearce

I am currently involved in the EU FloriNASH project, investigating the link between gut microflora and the progression from normal function to non-alcholic fatty-liver disease (NAFLD) and non-alcoholic steatosis (NASH) in clinical patients. My work involves the profiling of the structure of clinical cohorts, and integration of metabolite-profiles, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets.

Additionally I manage the operation of the Biomolecular Medicine groups IT assets.

While studying for my PhD, I also took the role of Data-Curator for the Consortium for Metabonomic Toxicology (COMET) project. In this capacity, I ensured the quality of the processed data as well as designing and implementing software to assist in the analysis of the COMET dataset.

Previous to my time at Imperial I studied Biochemistry at the University of Sussex. While at Sussex I undertook a project in X-ray crystallography and succeeded in growing the first X-ray quality crystal of the human protein Phosphoglucosse Isomerase, the structure of which, I assisted in the elucidation of and which is available from the PDB with the code 1IAT.

Upon completing my BSc I undertook an MSc in Bioinformatics at Birkbeck College, London. During my time at Birkbeck my project work specialised in database manipulation and integration, with special reference to the Gene Ontology database and FlyBase genome repository.

 

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Quicklook plug-ins for Mac OS X 

My work involves extensive use of MATLAB for computational analysis of metabolic profiling data-sets. To this end I have written a pair of plug-ins for Mac OS X to improve the integration of MATLAB with the operating system.

The MATLAB quicklook generator (for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow-Leopard and later) extends quicklook to give an overview of the variables in a .mat workspace file.

The metadata importer (for Mac OS X 10.4 and later) allows Spotlight to index the names of variable within a .mat file.

Both plug-ins are now updated to run in 64bit under Mac OS X 10.6 and later, and included several speed optimisations.

Additionally I have written a quicklook plugin to preview ePub documents. Downloads and source code for both plugins are available at GitHub.