Colette O'Neill Email & Phone Number

I first came to the University of Southampton in 2011 to work on the TSB/EPSRC funded CLIENT project (Clinic-based Infection Examination through Nucleic acid Technology), a collaborative project with industrial partners LGC and Optigene. The overall aim was to design a point-of-care test for chlamydia, the leading bacterial sexually transmitted infection worldwide. My next postdoctoral project (2013-2017) was to establish the world's first dedicated chlamydia culture collection, the Chlamydia Biobank (www.chlamydiabiobank.co.uk). Our mission is to collect and make representative and biologically interesting, genome sequenced strains available to researchers in the field. During the project I learned html/css to build the website, and also genome assembly/analysis techniques - both through self-directed study. Next, I worked on another WT funded project (2017-2021) in which I devised an inducible transposon mutagenesis system for C. trachomatis. This will enable saturation mutagenesis to interrogate the genome for essential genes under various growth conditions. Due to the pandemic, the usual high throughput sequencing technology used to analyse transposon mutant libraries was not available, so I adapted ONT nanopore sequencing for transposon identification and achieved proof of principle for our methodology. I also co-supervised two PhD students and a medical student project, and continued to manage the Biobank. Concurrently, I held a remote teaching role for the University of Bolton's Medical Biology course. This included organising the module schedule, writing new lectures and producing a number of activities and videos demonstrating lab procedures (remote learning in lieu of lab practicals). I also set and marked assessments and provided pastoral support to students.Next, my Senior Research Fellow role (2021-2023) built on our transposon mutagenesis system through improvements in gene expression regulation in Chlamydia, and transposon mutagenesis libraries were made and analysed using high throughput sequencing technology. I was appointed to Lecturer in Pharmacology at UoS in early 2023, with the post commencing on the 1st May 2023. I will also continue my research into Chlamydia and other sexaully transmitted infections.

Listed skills include Microbiology, Microbial Ecology, Molecular Biology, Qpcr, and 13 others.