Captured in our computers are the inner workings of representative strains of bacterial species that can infect humans or our domesticated plants and animals. Author of The Rough Guide to Evolution, Mark Pallen speaks of the powerful knowledge that this genome sequencing places at our disposal.

Moreover, we can be confident that this new science will enable us to identify the crucial changes in our ancestry that made us human.

Mark Pallen is Professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of Birmingham.  As well as The Rough Guide to Evolution, he is also co-author of Bacterial Pathogenomics. The Pallen Research Group benefits from Research-Council funding spanning bioinformatics and laboratory-based projects, with interests focussing on bacterial pathogenomics and type III secretion.

He obtained his medical education at Cambridge and the London Hospital Medical College before completing his specialist training as a medical microbiologist at Bart’s. He held a chair in microbiology at Queen’s University, Belfast before moving to Birmingham in 2001.

In 1996 while completing a PhD in molecular bacteriology at Imperial College, he led a student team to victory in University Challenge.