Muhammad Yasir Email & Phone Number

I am interested in the study of the molecular mechanisms of microorganisms. I started my career in microbiology by studying antimicrobial resistance during my masters. Then, I became interested in understanding the molecular and genomic basis of bacterial pathogenicity, and how bacteria adapt to different stress conditions. I joined Prof. Steve Busby’s lab at the University of Birmingham, UK as a Darwin Trust PhD studentship to understand gene expression regulation in pathogenic bacteria. My PhD research aimed to understand virulence gene regulation in a pathogenic Escherichia coli and how, the alteration in expression of these genes directly relates to the ability to cause disease. My PhD work shows that inactivation of the virulence gene’s regulator can change the phenotype of bacteria related to pathogenicity. The development of understanding of bacterial genes and promoters during my PhD increased my curiosity in the field of bacterial genomics and I became interested in the use of genomic tools like RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq and Transposon Insertion site Sequencing to understand various bacterial mechanisms.I joined Quadram Institute as a research scientist with the aim of developing and implementing an advanced version of Transposon Directed Insertion site Sequencing (TraDIS), which we have called TraDIS-Xpress. TraDIS-Xpress overcomes the limitation of TraDIS as it includes essential genes in the assay as well by measuring the changes in gene expression. TraDIS-Xpress technology enables us to assay the whole bacterial genome in any certain stress condition, down to sub-gene level resolution. We are using TraDIS-Xpress to understand antibiotic resistance mechanisms.

Listed skills include Biochemistry, Teaching, Laboratory, Microbiology, and 18 others.