Eriko Takano

Biography

Eriko Takano is a 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 since 2012. In 2014, she was appointed as one of the three directors for the EPSRC/BBSRC-funded Manchester Synthetic Biology Research Centre, SYNBIOCHEM. In 2018, she was appointed as the deputy head of Department of Chemistry.

Eriko graduated from Kitasato University in Japan and did her undergraduate project with Prof Satoshi Omura (2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine), before working at an R&D facility for a company, Meiji Seika Kaisha, for several years. After leaving industry, she obtained her PhD at the John Innes Institute, Norwich, UK, in 1994 on the regulation of antibiotic production in Streptomyces coelicolor.

Before her arrival in Manchester, she had been Associate Professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Assistant Professor (C1) at the Department of Microbiology / Biotechnology, University of Tübingen, in Germany.

Eriko is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the synthetic biology of microbes for antibiotic production. Her interests are in bioinformatics software development for designing natural products producers; untargeted metabolomics for chassis engineering in Streptomyces; secondary metabolite biosynthesis pathway assembly; and regulatory circuit engineering through signalling molecules and non-coding RNAs.

She has published 103 peer-reviewed papers and four book chapters and holds five patents. She is the Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and has served as an expert advisor for the European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks on synthetic biology, where she contributed to a series of three official Opinions with major impact on the development of the field.

RSC affiliations

• Editorial board, Natural Product Reports (NPR)