Regular biography
Eriko Takano is Professor of Synthetic Biology in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, Department of Chemistry, School of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, at the University of Manchester. She is one of three directors for the EPSRC/BBSRC-funded Manchester Synthetic Biology Research Centre, SYNBIOCHEM. Since 2017, she has been the Section Head of Chemical Biology and Biological Chemistry and has served as Deputy Head of the Chemistry Department since 2018. Her research focuses on the synthetic biology of antibiotic production, including bioinformatics software development and untargeted metabolomics for chassis engineering in Streptomyces.
Scholar-generated biography
Eriko Takano is a Professor of Synthetic Biology at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, University of Manchester. Her research focuses on synthetic biology, antibiotic production, systems biology, microbial signalling, and microbial regulation. She develops computational tools and experimental strategies to mine genomes for biosynthetic gene clusters, enhancing the discovery and engineering of secondary metabolites. Her work includes the development of antiSMASH, a platform for genome mining of biosynthetic gene clusters, and studies on microbial signalling molecules like γ-butyrolactones that regulate antibiotic production. Her research bridges computational and experimental approaches to advance sustainable antibiotic discovery and microbial production systems.