Prof Alastair Grant

Biography

I retired in 2023 after 34 years in the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA, but continue with research examining how environmental variables shape microbial communities, with a particular focus on the impacts of metal pollution in the marine environment.

I use metabarcoding with multiple primer pairs to give a detailed picture of bacterial, archaeal and eukaryote communities. I supplement this with RNAseq of total RNA to avoid the PCR biases that are inherent in metabarcoding and obtain unbiased abundance data for all organisms that are present.

To assist this, I have developed the KSGP database of prokaryote 16S and eukaryote 18S sequences. This removes mis-annotated small subunit ribosomal sequences from the GTDB, PR2 and MIDORI2 databases and uses these to annotate a large collection of rRNA sequences and re-annotate the prokaryote sequences from SILVA. The new database allows substantially higher rates of taxonomic annotation for Archaea metabarcoding data than either GreenGenes2 or SILVA and also has some advantages for annotating bacterial metabarcoding data.