Mary Lyon Medal 2026 – Prof Zamin Iqbal
The Genetics Society is delighted to announce Prof Zamin Iqbal, University of Bath, as the winner of the 2026 Mary Lyon Medal.
Zamin Iqbal is Professor of Algorithmic and Microbial Genomics at the University of Bath, where he works in the Milner Centre for Evolution. His research uses computational methods to study the evolution and epidemiology of bacteria.
Zam pioneered the use of pangenome graphs as a means for studying genetic variation within a species, first on humans before moving to work on parasites and bacteria. His group used these to develop reliable methods of genotyping of drug resistance mutations in bacteria, particularly in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. As part of the CRyPTIC consortium, they used clinical isolates of M. tuberculosis from over 23 countries to study the genetic basis of drug resistant TB, leading to the first WHO catalogue of resistance mutations.
As sequence data volumes continued to grow exponentially, Zam’s research group worked on the problem of how to make this data more useful to more biologists. Since the data size was outstripping the abilities of BLAST and its successors, they developed a succession of search indexes and in 2024 developed a new algorithm achieving fast, low-resource BLAST-like alignment to millions of prokaryotic genomes. Meanwhile, realising their attempts to single-handedly curate better genomes were not scalable, they started a global community project to uniformly re-assemble and annotate all bacterial data. This project, AllTheBacteria, has now made 2.4 million annotated bacterial genomes available and searchable, and released over 16 million structures of novel proteins.
His group has worked on the problem of how to study the evolution and epidemiology of plasmids. They studied this both through new computational methods and through using historical samples predating human antibiotic use. They showed that plasmid evolution involves a unique form of diversity generation, involving both hybridisation of unrelated plasmids and fragmentation, probably mostly through mobile-element-mediated recombination. The finding that many of the historical plasmids are no longer extant after only 100 years, essentially extinct except for fragments saved by recombination, provided an alternative perspective on the “plasmid paradox”, which asks how plasmids survive in populations despite the cost of carriage.
Zam obtained a degree in mathematics at Cambridge University, followed by a PhD in mathematics at the University of Oxford, and then several years in the software industry, where he worked on the operating system for the first mobile phones with cameras. He returned to science by taking a programming job at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). He pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of Oxford, and then won a Royal Society/Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Award, starting a research group on bacterial genomics. He spent several years at EMBL-EBI before moving to the University of Bath in 2023.
