Biography:James O. McInerney

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James McInerney at the School of Life Sciences, University of Nottingham.

James O. McInerney is an Irish-born microbiologist, computational evolutionary biologist, professor, and former head of the School of Life Sciences[1] at the University of Nottingham. He is an elected Fellow of the European Academy of Microbiology, of the American Society for Microbiology, and of the Linnean Society. In June 2020 he was elected president-designate of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution and in 2022 he took up the role of President. He is deputy chair of BBSRC committee C.

Early life and education

McInerney completed his bachelor's degree at NUI Galway.[2] In 1994, he was awarded a PhD (also from NUI Galway).[2] In 2013, he was awarded a Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from the National University of Ireland.

Career and research

After completing his PhD, McInerney worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Diagnostics Centre in Galway and in the Department of Zoology at The Natural History Museum, London. In 1999, McInerney returned to Ireland to set up the Bioinformatics Research Group at NUI Maynooth and became the Director of the Genetics and Bioinformatics degree course. In 2012-2013, he took a sabbatical at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University. In 2015, the McInerney research group moved to The University of Manchester where McInerney took up a Chair in Evolutionary Biology. In 2016, McInerney was appointed as the Director of the Research Domain of "Evolution, Systems and Genomics " in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health at the University of Manchester. In 2018, McInerney moved from Manchester to the University of Nottingham, to take up the Chair in Evolutionary Biology and the position of Head of the School of Life Sciences.[3] In August 2024, McInerney moved to The University of Liverpool to take up the position of Head of the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Behaviour.[4]

McInerney's early research career focused on the study of codon usage in a variety of organisms including Trichomonas vaginalis and Borrelia burgdorferi. McInerney was the first to show that the leading strands of replication and the lagging strands of replication in a prokaryotic genome could have significantly different codon usage patterns, due to the way in which polymerases replicate DNA.[5] One of his first software packages, GCUA,[6] allowed for the accessible and reproducible analysis of codon usage by other biologists. Since then, the McInerney research group has published several bioinformatic software programs including Clann:[7] Software for inferring phylogenetic supertrees, Crann:[8] Software for inferring selection, Modelgenerator:[9] Amino acid and nucleotide substitution model selection, PutGaps: DNA gapped file from amino acid alignment, and TIGER:[10] Identifying rapidly-evolving characters in evolutionary data.

Currently, the McInerney lab focusses on understanding the origins of eukaryotes,[11] and on understanding horizontal gene transfer, and prokaryotic pangenomes and the assemblage of genes within them[12][13]

McInerney has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Leverhulme Trust, The European Molecular Biology Organisation, and Science Foundation Ireland and with start-up funding from both the University of Manchester and the University of Nottingham.

Awards and honours

Public outreach

  • Synopsis of Nature Micro (2017) paper "Why Prokaryotes Have Pangenomes"[14]
  • Speaking on Virgin Births (parthenogenesis) for FBMH's science-themed advent calendar[15]
  • Synopsis of Nature (2015) paper "Endosymbiotic origin and differential loss of eukaryotic genes"[16]
  • Radio interview for RTE's "Bright Sparks" radio series[17]
  • Synopsis of polar bear paper Cell (2014) paper "Population Genomics Reveal Recent Speciation and Rapid Evolutionary Adaptation in Polar Bears"[18]

References

  1. ↑ "James McInerney - The University of Nottingham". https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/life-sciences/people/james.mcinerney. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "James McInerney". University of Nottingham. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/life-sciences/people/james.mcinerney. 
  3. ↑ "Welcome to the School of Life Sciences - The University of Nottingham". https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/life-sciences/. 
  4. ↑ "Professor James McInerney". https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/james-mcinerney/. 
  5. ↑ McInerney, J. O. (1998-09-01). "Replicational and transcriptional selection on codon usage in Borrelia burgdorferi". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 95 (18): 10698–10703. doi:10.1073/pnas.95.18.10698. ISSN 0027-8424. PMID 9724767. Bibcode: 1998PNAS...9510698M. 
  6. ↑ McInerney, J. O. (1998-01-01). "GCUA: general codon usage analysis.". Bioinformatics 14 (4): 372–373. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/14.4.372. ISSN 1367-4803. PMID 9632833. 
  7. ↑ Creevey, C. J.; McInerney, J. O. (2005-02-01). "Clann: investigating phylogenetic information through supertree analyses". Bioinformatics 21 (3): 390–392. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti020. ISSN 1367-4803. PMID 15374874. 
  8. ↑ McInerney, J. O.; Creevey, C. J. (2003-09-01). "CRANN: detecting adaptive evolution in protein-coding DNA sequences". Bioinformatics 19 (13): 1726. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btg225. ISSN 1367-4803. PMID 15593409. 
  9. ↑ Keane, Thomas M.; Creevey, Christopher J.; Pentony, Melissa M.; Naughton, Thomas J.; Mclnerney, James O. (2006-03-24). "Assessment of methods for amino acid matrix selection and their use on empirical data shows that ad hoc assumptions for choice of matrix are not justified". BMC Evolutionary Biology 6 (1): 29. doi:10.1186/1471-2148-6-29. ISSN 1471-2148. PMID 16563161. 
  10. ↑ Cummins, Carla A.; McInerney, James O. (December 2011). "A method for inferring the rate of evolution of homologous characters that can potentially improve phylogenetic inference, resolve deep divergence and correct systematic biases". Systematic Biology 60 (6): 833–844. doi:10.1093/sysbio/syr064. ISSN 1076-836X. PMID 21804093. 
  11. ↑ Martin, William F.; Landan, Giddy; McInerney, James O.; Hazkani-Covo, Einat; David Bryant; Lockhart, Peter J.; Sousa, Filipa L.; Roettger, Mayo et al. (August 2015). "Endosymbiotic origin and differential loss of eukaryotic genes". Nature 524 (7566): 427–432. doi:10.1038/nature14963. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 26287458. Bibcode: 2015Natur.524..427K. http://mcinerneylab.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Nature-2014-Nelson-Sathi.pdf. 
  12. ↑ O'Connell, Mary J.; McNally, Alan; McInerney, James O. (April 2017). "Why prokaryotes have pangenomes". Nature Microbiology 2 (4): 17040. doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2017.40. ISSN 2058-5276. PMID 28350002. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/113972/39/McInerney_McNally_O%27Connell_NatMicro.pdf. 
  13. ↑ Beavan, A. J. S.; Domingo-Sananes, M. R.; McInerney, J. O. (2024). "Contingency, repeatability, and predictability in the evolution of a prokaryotic pangenome". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121 (1). doi:10.1073/pnas.2304934120. 
  14. ↑ "Short Video Explaining Pangenomes Paper". 2017-03-29. http://mcinerneylab.com/evolution/short-video-explaining-pangenomes-paper/. 
  15. ↑ "Prof. McInerney Speaking About Virgin Births (Parthenogenesis)". 2016-11-30. http://mcinerneylab.com/in-the-media/prof-mcinerney-speaking-virgin-births-parthenogenesis/. 
  16. ↑ "Short Video On Recent Paper In Nature". 2015-08-25. http://mcinerneylab.com/evolution/short-video-on-recent-paper-in-nature/. 
  17. ↑ "Prof McInerney Interviewed for RTE "Bright Sparks" Radio Series". 2015-06-01. http://mcinerneylab.com/blog/prof-mcinerney-interviewed-for-rte-bright-sparks-radio-series/. 
  18. ↑ Maynooth University (2014-05-09), Prof James McInerney - A New Dawn for Polar Bear Genetics, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZyts1XZ-rk&t=44s, retrieved 2019-07-19 



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