Jack Connolly

Jack Connolly is a Research Fellow (Actinomycete) at the University of Manchester's Department of Chemical Biology and Biological Chemistry, affiliated with the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology. His research focuses on synthetic biology, microbial engineering, and antibiotic biosynthesis. Key areas include natural product engineering, genome annotation of industrial bacteria, and microbiome manipulation for agricultural applications. Recent work includes advancing MIBiG 4.0 for biosynthetic gene cluster curation and developing methods to enhance antibiotic and flavonoid production in engineered microbes.

Research Interests:

• Synthetic Biology applications in natural product discovery
• Biosynthetic pathway elucidation for antibiotics like mupirocin and marinomycin
• Engineering microbial systems for sustainable biomanufacturing
• Microbiome-based solutions for plant growth optimization

Publications reflect a strong focus on:

• Natural product engineering methodologies
• Genome-scale annotation techniques
• Microbial community engineering strategies