Allison McInnes is the Senior flow cytometey scientist and manager of the Centre for Microbiome Research (CMR) flow cytometry facility. Throughout her career she has led the development and optimisation of novel flow cytometric methods to probe key functions of marine microbes, including carbon and nitrogen fixation, stress response to temperature and silicification of diatoms.
At the Centre for Microbiome Research, she is developing novel assays for quantification and high-throughput isolation of microbes from the coral holobiont, human gut, rumen and permafrost systems. She is a partner to the Australian Human Microbiome Biobank where she is developing innovative methods in spectral cytometry and sorting to classify the auto-fluorescent signatures of microbes to target, enrich and isolate novel microbes from the human microbiome.
Her goal is to apply these learnings in spectral cytometry to drive our understanding of diverse microbial ecosystems enabling microbiologists to monitor these dynamic communities on ecologically relevant time and space scales.