Andrew McMahon

Postdoctoral fellow

I completed an MSci in Natural Sciences (Physics) from the University of Cambridge, specialising in biological physics, and completed a part II project on the computational modelling of pressure waves in shock tubes for the use on ciliated membranes. I completed my DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford in the lab of Nicole Robb titled: "Fluorescence imaging and modelling of virus structure and infection". Since March 2023, I have been in the lab of Seamus Holden at the University of Warwick working on bacterial cell elongation.

Email: andrew.mcmahon@warwick.ac.uk

Github: amcmahon1345
Almost all bacteria are surrounded by a peptidoglycan (PG) cell wall which allows bacteria to withstand high internal turgor pressures. The bacterial cell wall is of critical medical importance as the key target of our most widely used antibiotics such as the penicillins and cephalosporins. During cell growth, most PG synthesis is carried out by a multi-protein complex called the elongasome, which inserts PG strands processively around the cell circumference. The elongasome functions by building a growing PG polymer out of lipid II building blocks and attaching it to the existing cell wall material. My current research is investigating the cell wall building processes using single particle tracking (SPT) and SRFM.



Papers

2024

  1. Engineering stress as a motivation for filamentous virus morphology
    Andrew McMahon, Swetha Vijayakrishnan, Hafez El Sayyed, and 4 more authors
    Biophysical Reports, Sep 2024
  2. Molecular motor tug-of-war regulates elongasome cell wall synthesis dynamics in bacillus subtilis
    Stuart Middlemiss, Matthieu Blandenet, David M. Roberts, and 8 more authors
    Nature Communications, Jun 2024

2023

  1. High-throughput super-resolution analysis of influenza virus pleomorphism reveals insights into viral spatial organization
    Andrew McMahon, Rebecca Andrews, Danielle Groves, and 4 more authors
    PLOS Pathogens, Jun 2023
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2022

  1. Virus detection and identification in minutes using single-particle imaging and deep learning
    Nicolas Shiaelis, Alexander Tometzki, Leon Peto, and 8 more authors
    ACS Nano, Jun 2022
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2020

  1. Reinfection with SARS-COV-2: Discrete sir (susceptible, infected, recovered) modeling using empirical infection data
    Andrew McMahon, and Nicole C Robb
    JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, Jun 2020
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