Who runs NS Bio
I’m Dr Nathaniel Storey, founder and director of NS Bio Limited. NS Bio is a sole-director consultancy with a small network of trusted contractor bioinformaticians I bring in for larger projects on a per-engagement basis. Every engagement is handled directly — no account managers, no layers of project coordinators between you and the person doing the work.
My background is in pathogen genomics across clinical and public-sector settings — peer-reviewed contributions span viral surveillance, clinical metagenomics, and outbreak investigation, in journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, and eLife. My ORCID profile is 0000-0001-5942-4674 for anyone who wants the full publication record.
What we do
Pathogen genomics is the core of the practice. Recent and current work spans:
- Whole-genome sequencing analysis for healthcare and public-sector clients — bacterial typing, AMR gene detection, serogrouping, outbreak investigation
- Amplicon-based community profiling — 16S rRNA and ITS pipelines for microbial diversity, taxonomic composition, and rarefaction analysis
- Custom pipelines and reference genome work — tailored analyses for research projects where standard tools don’t fit, including long-read assemblies and population genomics
NS Bio recently contributed to the Curreya pithyophila project — a Scotland-wide investigation into an emerging fungal pathogen of Caledonian Scots pine, funded through Defra’s GAP DC2 programme. We performed the genomic analyses, including reference genome assembly from PacBio HiFi long reads and SNP-based population structure analyses across 40 isolates from across Britain. The project was a collaboration with Forest Research and the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh.
Beyond the productised pipelines, NS Bio takes on bespoke engagements in adjacent capability areas — including metagenomics for unknown-pathogen identification (where conventional testing comes back negative), viral whole-genome sequencing and outbreak phylogenetics, and clinical sequencing analysis. Each is scoped per-project against your specific requirements rather than offered as an off-the-shelf pipeline.
How we work
The way NS Bio handles client data is the part most worth being explicit about:
- UK sovereign. Client data is stored, processed, and analysed exclusively on UK soil, on infrastructure NS Bio controls. No data leaves the country.
- Anonymised by default. Pathogen samples are handled by anonymised sample identifiers; we don’t see, don’t need, and don’t want any patient-identifying information.
- Self-hosted. Compute and storage run on infrastructure NS Bio owns and operates — not commodity cloud platforms or third-party SaaS where we can’t guarantee data residency.
- Reproducible. Every analysis is captured as version-controlled code with pinned dependencies, so any result can be independently re-derived by us or by you.
- Honest about scope. Where work is done by contractor bioinformaticians, we say so. Where capability is being built rather than already in place, we say so.
Sectors we work with
NS Bio’s clients are typically in healthcare (NHS Trusts, public health bodies), the public sector (Defra, Forest Research, and other government science programmes), and academic research collaborations.
Get in touch
Quotes are usually returnable within 48 hours of an initial conversation. If you’d like to discuss a project, send a note to enquiries@ns-bio.co.uk describing roughly what you’re trying to do — we’ll come back with questions and a sensible next step.