Alan McNally

Alan McNally is a professor of microbial genomics at the University of Birmingham, UK. He works on the evolutionary genomics and antimicrobial resistance in bacterial pathogens.

Education

Following undergraduate training at the University of Glasgow (1994-1999), McNally was awarded a PhD in Molecular Microbiology from the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh, in 2003.[1]

Research

His laboratory is known for work on:

  • Yersinia species as a model organism for studying bacterial evolution,[2]
  • how bacterial genetic variability can be used to track changes in bacterial populations,[3]
  • how lineages of COVID-19 can vary in their viral load,[4]

He has active collaborations in the UK, China, Germany, France, Vietnam, and the US.[5]

COVID-19 pandemic work

During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, McNally was seconded to the Milton Keynes Lighthouse Labs as Infectious Disease lead at the Government’s first flagship COVID-19 testing facility. Launched on 9 April 2020, the Milton Keynes Lighthouse Lab was the first of three UK ‘mega-labs’ that vastly increased the testing capacity, allowing many more patient samples to be processed each day.[6]

References

  1. ^ "Alan McNally". University of Birmingham. Retrieved 10 April 2024.
  2. ^ McNally, Alan; Thomson, Nicholas R.; Reuter, Sandra; Wren, Brendan W. (March 2016). "'Add, stir and reduce': Yersinia spp. as model bacteria for pathogen evolution". Nature Reviews Microbiology. 14 (3): 177–190. doi:10.1038/nrmicro.2015.29. PMID 26876035.
  3. ^ McNally, Alan; Oren, Yaara; Kelly, Darren; Pascoe, Ben; Dunn, Steven; Sreecharan, Tristan; Vehkala, Minna; Välimäki, Niko; Prentice, Michael B.; Ashour, Amgad; Avram, Oren; Pupko, Tal; Dobrindt, Ulrich; Literak, Ivan; Guenther, Sebastian; Schaufler, Katharina; Wieler, Lothar H.; Zhiyong, Zong; Sheppard, Samuel K.; McInerney, James O.; Corander, Jukka (12 September 2016). "Combined Analysis of Variation in Core, Accessory and Regulatory Genome Regions Provides a Super-Resolution View into the Evolution of Bacterial Populations". PLOS Genetics. 12 (9): e1006280. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1006280. hdl:10852/53384.
  4. ^ Kidd, Michael; Richter, Alex; Best, Angus; Cumley, Nicola; Mirza, Jeremy; Percival, Benita; Mayhew, Megan; Megram, Oliver; Ashford, Fiona; White, Thomas; Moles-Garcia, Emma; Crawford, Liam; Bosworth, Andrew; Atabani, Sowsan F; Plant, Tim; McNally, Alan (28 May 2021). "S-Variant SARS-CoV-2 Lineage B1.1.7 Is Associated With Significantly Higher Viral Load in Samples Tested by TaqPath Polymerase Chain Reaction". The Journal of Infectious Diseases. 223 (10): 1666–1670. doi:10.1093/infdis/jiab082. PMC 7928763.
  5. ^ "Professor Alan McNally". bsac-conference.com. Retrieved 10 April 2024.
  6. ^ "Alan McNally batonbearers". University of Birmingham. Retrieved 10 April 2024.