Dr Conrad Bessant
Reader in Chemometrics & Bioinformatics
Location: Cranfield Health, Building 63, Cranfield Campus
E: c.bessant@cranfield.ac.uk
T: +44 (0)1234 758300
Current activities
Dr Conrad Bessant is the founder and current leader of Cranfield's Bioinformatics Group. His primary research interest is the identification and quantitation of proteins and metabolites from highly multivariate datasets, such as those obtained from mass spectrometry, vibrational spectroscopy and sensor arrays. Applications of this work currently underway in the group include biomarker discovery, medical diagnostics, food quality studies and systems biology. Conrad established Cranfield's popular BBSRC-funded MSc in Applied Bioinformatics and his textbook Building Bioinformatics Solutions is one of the most popular in the field.
Clients and Funding
Dr Bessant has received funding from BBSRC, EPSRC, the Wellcome Trust, GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever, Oxford BioTherapeutics and the European Commission.
External Activities
- Visiting Associate Professor, Kitakyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
- Member of the Editorial Board of Proteomics
- Core member of BBSRC Research Committee C
- External Examiner, MSc Bioinformatics, Cardiff University
- External Examiner, MSc Applied Bioinformatics, University of Hertfordshire
- Guest Professor at Hengyang Normal University, China
Background
Conrad was awarded a degree in Physics by Nottingham University in 1994 and went on to complete a PhD in Chemometrics in 1999. He then joined Richard Brereton’s chemometrics group at the University of Bristol before being appointed as a lecturer at Cranfield the following year, heading up a new bioinformatics activity.
Selected publications
Building Bioinformatics Solutions with Perl, R and MySQL, C. Bessant, I. Shadforth, D. Oakley, Oxford University Press, 2008.
MRMaid: The Web-Based Tool for Designing Multiple Reaction Monitoring (MRM) Transitions, J.A. Mead, L. Bianco, V. Ottone, C. Barton, R.G. Kay, K.S. Lilley, N.J. Bond, C. Bessant, Molecular & Cellular Proteomics, 2009, 8 (4), 696-705.
Protein-Folding Location Can Regulate Manganese Binding Versus Copper- or Zinc-Binding, S. Tottey, K.J. Waldron, S.J. Firbank, B. Reale, C. Bessant, K. Sato, T.R. Cheek, J. Gray, M.J. Banfield, C. Dennison and N.J. Robinson, Nature, 2008, 455, 1138-1142.
Mapping the Arabidopsis Organelle Proteome, T. P. J. Dunkley, S. Hester, I. P. Shadforth, J. Runions, T. Weimar, S.L. Hanton, J. L. Griffin, C. Bessant, F. Brandizzi, C. Hawes, R. B. Watson, P. Dupree, K. S. Lilley. PNAS, 2006, 103, 6518-6523.
i-Tracker: For Quantitative Proteomics using iTRAQ. I. Shadforth, T. Dunkley, K. Lilley, C. Bessant. BMC Genomics, 6, 2005, 145.
Simultaneous Determination of Ethanol, Fructose and Glucose at an Unmodified Platinum Electrode using Artificial Neural Networks. C. Bessant, S.Saini, Analytical Chemistry, 1999, 71 (14), 2806-2813.
