Ciaran Kelly

Overall Research Interests:

Our group tries to engineer biology for real-world impact: from scalable synthetic metabolism to microbes for sustainable agriculture. We evolve and engineer plant growth promoting bacteria for more robust growth of crops in challenging climates, we engineer bacteria to produce important industrial pre-cursor chemicals through sustainable routes and we try to make the engineering of bacteria easier and more predictable through the development of tools for precise genetic regulation, the one-pot assembly of chimeric membrane proteins and through tools to accelerate evolution of strains.

Collaborations:

I am very keen to collaborate with companies on ways to engineer organisms for the reliable scaling-up of bioproduction, as well as companies interested in developing novel antimicrobial approaches using Synthetic Biology. Please get in touch at [email protected]

I was recruited to the Department as a Vice-Chancellor's Fellow in Molecular Biosciences in 2019.

To find out more about recent grant successes, current lab members, publications and exciting research projects, check out: kellysynbio.com.

Background:

As an undergraduate, I studied genetics at the University of Glasgow, and my Honours Project investigated the central genetic circuits controlling the plant circadian clock; research I continued after graduation in the evenings after work, eventually published in Science [14]. I was lucky to lead research expeditions to the Amazon basin in Ecuador in 2004 and 2005, and it was these trips that instilled my drive to combine genetics/DNA with environmental applications.

I obtained my PhD in Molecular Microbiology at the University of Dundee in 2013. My PhD thesis explored the use of synthetic biology for biohydrogen production in Escherichia coli. This involved the first successful integration of a complex bifurcating hydrogen--producing enzyme into the anaerobic metabolism of E. coli, the first evidence that a native E. coli hydrogen enzyme operated bidirectionally in vivo, and the first successful reengineering of the native hydrogen--producing enzyme of E. coli to accept electrons from other sources.

Following my PhD I focussed on learning and developing approaches and tools enabling predictable engineering of biological pathways and circuits. My postdoctoral experience included positions at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London and Newcastle University. This research focussed on the development of novel tools enabling precise, orthogonal control of gene expression in model and non-model organisms, synthetic metabolic engineering of photosynthetic bacteria for novel light-driven carbon fixation and the first use of engineered Hfq-associated small RNAs in synthetic negative-feedback circuits.