Dr Andrew Millard

Dr Andrew Millard is an associate professor in bacteriophage bioinformatics.

Dr Millard studied at the University of Plymouth gaining a degree in Micro and Cell Biology before moving to the University of Warwick to complete a PhD in the molecular biology of marine cyanophages, leading the genome sequencing of the marine cyanophage S-PM2. This was followed by postdoctoral positions with Professor N Mann and Professor D Scanlan in the area of marine microbiology.

In 2013 Dr Millard moved from the School of Life Sciences to Warwick Medical School to take up a position as a senior research fellow and establish a group in the newly formed Microbiology and Infection Unit. Here Dr Millard set up the server infrastructure for the high-throughput analysis of bacterial genomes.

In 2017 Dr Millard moved to Leicester to take up a position as a lecturer in bacteriophage bioinformatics. Throughout Dr Millard’s career his research has focused on the interaction of bacteriophages with their bacterial hosts.

Further details can be found here: www.millardlab.org 

Current research focuses on the interaction of phages with their bacterial hosts in a variety of systems. This includes:

• The role of phages in horizontal gene transfer in animal slurries (NERC), in collaboration with researchers at the University of Nottingham.
• Understanding the function of cyanophage auxiliary metabolic genes, with collaborators at the University of Warwick.
• Development of phage cocktails against aquaculture pathogens, with collaborators at the University of Copenhagen and Centro de Investigciones Biologicas del Noroeste, La Paz.

Cook, Ryan, Nathan Brown, Tamsin Redgwell, Branko Rihtman, Megan Barnes, Martha Clokie, Dov J. Stekel, Jon Hobman, Michael A. Jones, and Andrew Millard. 2021. 'Infrastructure for a PHAge REference Database: Identification of Large-Scale Biases in the Current Collection of Phage Genomes' bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.01.442102. Inpress PHAGE

Cook, Ryan, Steve Hooton, Urmi Trivedi, Liz King, Christine E. R. Dodd, Jon L. Hobman, Dov J. Stekel, Michael A. Jones, and Andrew D. Millard. 2021. 'Hybrid Assembly of an Agricultural Slurry Virome Reveals a Diverse and Stable Community with the Potential to Alter the Metabolism and Virulence of Veterinary Pathogens.' Microbiome 9 (1): 65.

Rihtman, Branko, Richard J. Puxty, Alexia Hapeshi, Yan-Jiun Lee, Yuanchao Zhan, Slawomir Michniewski, Nicholas R. Waterfield, Andrew Millard et al. 2021. 'A New Family of Globally Distributed Lytic Roseophages with Unusual Deoxythymidine to Deoxyuridine Substitution.' Current Biology: CB 31 (14): 3199-3206.e4.

Grigonyte, Aurelija M., Alexia Hapeshi, Chrystala Constantinidou, and Andrew Millard. 2021. 'Modification of Bacteriophages to Increase Their Association with Lung Epithelium Cells In Vitro.' Pharmaceuticals 14 (4). https://doi.org/10.3390/ph14040308.

Sirén, Kimmo, Andrew Millard, Bent Petersen, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Martha R. J. Clokie, and Thomas Pontén, 2021. 'Rapid Discovery of Novel Prophages Using Biological Feature Engineering and Machine Learning.' NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics 3 (1): lqaa109.

Grigonyte, Aurelija M., Christian Harrison, Paul R. MacDonald, Ariadna Montero-Blay, Matthew Tridgett, John Duncan, Antonia P. Sagona, Chrystala Constantinidou, Alfonso Jaramillo, and Andrew Millard. 2020. 'Comparison of CRISPR and Marker-Based Methods for the Engineering of Phage T7.' Viruses. https://doi.org/10.3390/v12020193.

Babenko, V. V., A. Millard, E. E. Kulikov, N. N. Spasskaya, M. A. Letarova, D. N. Konanov, I. S. Belalov, and A. V. Letarov. 2020. 'The Ecogenomics of dsDNA Bacteriophages in Feces of Stabled and Feral Horses.' Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal 18 (November): 3457-67.

Michniewski, Slawomir, Tamsin Redgwell, Aurelija Grigonyte, Branko Rihtman, Maria Aguilo-Ferretjans, Joseph Christie-Oleza, Eleanor Jameson, David J. Scanlan, and Andrew D. Millard. 2019. 'Riding the Wave of Genomics to Investigate Aquatic Coliphage Diversity and Activity.' Environmental Microbiology 21 (6): 2112-28.

Arya, Sankalp, Henry Todman, Michelle Baker, Steven Hooton, Andrew Millard, Jan-Ulrich Kreft, Jon L. Hobman, and Dov J. Stekel. 2020. 'A Generalised Model for Generalised Transduction: The Importance of Co-Evolution and Stochasticity in Phage Mediated Antimicrobial Resistance Transfer.' FEMS Microbiology Ecology 96 (7). https://doi.org/10.1093/femsec/fiaa100.

Bacteriophage-host interactions

Phage resistance in bacteria

Phage mediated horizontal gene transfer

Development of phage cocktails 

Biological Sciences (Microbiology)

Biological Sciences

Biological Sciences Foundation Year