Research Experience

Dr. Umer Zeeshan Ijaz has been developing engineered systems and scientific software for over 23 years: He has a diverse portfolio (65+ research projects; £21M+ grant funding as principle/co-investigator, international participant; with authorship on over200+ publications), recently on microbial informatics involving machine learning and numerical ecology techniques. His major contributions in the past decade are towards: reducing error rates in NGS platforms for efficiently conducting sequencing based microbial community surveys; recovery of microbial genomes from mixed community soups; and developing dietary intervention strategies to reduce gut inflammation; and developing multivariate statistical platforms to understand how microbial communities assemble, their stability analyses, and how they relate to clinical outcomes. Dr Ijaz’s group has dedicated high-performance computing facility for bioinformatics analysis and data storage, Orion Cluster that is tailored towards microbial community surveys (~19 servers, ~500+ cores,~800TB disk space, and over 500 bioinformatics and visualisation tools and workflows) and serves as the backbone for this consortium.

Publications

P. Dessi, C. Buenano, S. Martinez-Sosa, S. Mills, A. Trego, U. Z. Ijaz, D. Pant, S. Puig, V. O’Flaherty, and P. Farras. Microbial electrosynthesis of acetate from CO2 in three-chamber cells with gas diffusion biocathode under moderate saline conditions. Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, accepted for publication (2023).

S. Singh, C. Keating,U. Z. Ijaz^#, and F. Hassard. Molecular insights informing factors affecting low temperature anaerobic applications: diversity, collated coremicrobiomes and complexity stability relationships in LCFA-fed systems, Science of the Total Environment, 874: 162420, 2023. DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162420

M. Batool, C.Keating, S. Javed, A. Nasir, M. Muddassar^#, and U. Z. Ijaz^#.A cross-sectional study of potential antimicrobial resistance and ecology in gastrointestinal and oral microbial communities of young normoweight Pakistani individuals. Microorganisms, 11(2):279, 2023.DOI: 10.3390/microorganisms11020279

A. Trego, C. Keating,C. Nzeteu, A. Graham, V. O'Flaherty, and U. Z. Ijaz^#. Beyond basic diversity estimates - Analytical tools for mechanistic interpretations of amplicon sequencing data.Microorganisms, 10(10):1961, 2022. DOI:10.3390/microorganisms10101961

S. Mills, P. Dessi,D. Pant, P. Farras, W. T. Sloan, G. Collins^#, and U. Z. Ijaz^#.A meta-analysis of acetogenic and methanogenic microbiomes in microbialelectrosynthesis. npj Biofilms and Microbiome, 8:73, 2022.

U. Z. Ijaz^#,O. Gundogdu, C. Keating, M. van Eekert, W. Gibson, J. Parkhill, F.Abilahi, B. Liseki, V.-A. Nguyen, S. Sudgen, C. Quince, J. H. J. Ensink, B.Torondel, and A. W. Walker. Analysis of pit latrine microbiota reveals depth-related variation in composition, and key parameters and taxa associated with fill-up rate. Frontiers in Microbiology, 13:960747, 2022. DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2022.960747 ^#Corresponding author

K. Bain, B. Nichols, F. Moffat, C. Kerbiriou, U. Z. Ijaz, K. Gerasimidis, I. McInnes, A. Åstrand, S. Holmes, and S. Milling. Stratification of alopecia areata reveals involvement of CD4 T cell populations and altered faecal microbiota. Clinical and Experimental Immunology, 210(2):175-186, 2022. DOI: 10.1093/cei/uxac088

M. F. Carboni, S. Mills, S. Arriaga, G. Collins, U. Z. Ijaz, and P. N. L. Lens. Autotrophic denitrification of nitrate rich wastewater in fluidized bed reactors using pyrite and elemental sulfur as electron donors. Environmental Technology & Innovation, 102878, 2022.
DOI: 10.1016/j.eti.2022.102878

J. Yin, X. Chen, X.Li, G. Kang, P. Wang, Y. Song, U. Z. Ijaz, H. Yin, and H. Huang. A droplet-based microfluidic approach to isolating functional bacteria from gut microbiota. Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, 12:920986,2022. DOI: 10.3389/fcimb.2022.920986

F. Cholet, A. Lisik, H. Agogué, U. Z. Ijaz, P. Pineau, N. Lachaussée, and C. J. Smith. Ecological observations based on functional gene sequencing are sensitive to the amplicon processing method. mSphere, e00324-22, 2022. DOI: 10.1128/msphere.00324-22

V. B. Birlanga, G. McCormack, U. Z. Ijaz, E. McCarthy, C. J. Smith, and G. Collins. Dynamic gill and mucous microbiomes during a gill disease episode in farmed Atlantic salmon. Scientific Reports, 12:16719, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-17008-2

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Dr Umer Zeeshan Ijaz

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Research Experience

Publications

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