Sera is a Masters student in the McInerney lab, working on the incidence of composite genes in prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Composite genes are those genes that have multiple homologies to different genes. In other words, they are genes that have been assembled by using parts of other genes.
Sera spends her time developing analysis pipelines in order to take genome sequences and identify the composite genes in those genomes. She is currently working with a dataset of more than 2 million genes.