Prof. Adelson’s current research also focuses on the non-coding portions of animal genomes, such as regions used to transcribe ncRNAs (piRNAs and lncRNAs) and the computational analysis of repetitive, so called “Junk DNA”, in order to understand large scale evolutionary/structural changes in animal genomes. Prof. Adelson has led the analysis of repetitive DNA for the cow, horse and elephant genome sequencing consortia and his lab has recently finished working on the Tuatara repetitive DNA analysis for that international genome sequencing consortium. In addition to characterising repeat content in genomes, his lab continues to develop a set of tools to identify and annotate transposable elements and segmental duplications “from scratch” and to use long read sequencing technology to identify somatic structural variants.. Additional aspects of the genome evolution work include understanding the impact of horizontal transfer of repetitive elements in higher organisms.