About — NS Bio

FoundedOctober 2023

DirectorDr Nathaniel Storey

RegisteredEngland & Wales (SIC 72110)

LocationUnited Kingdom

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.

ORCID 0000-0001-5942-4674 verified researcher ID

ResearchGate Full publication list →

Dr Nathaniel Storey, Founder and Director of NS Bio Limited

Dr Nathaniel Storey Founder & Director

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.

What clients say

Most NS Bio engagements are under standard confidentiality, which means quotes need explicit comms-team sign-off before they can be shared publicly — common practice in NHS and public-sector work. This section will populate as clients give permission to share. For verifiable references on specific work, get in touch and we can arrange direct conversations.

Get in touch