Leanne Pearson
Leanne is a researcher and science writer specialising in environmental microbiology, water quality and natural products research. After completing her PhD at the University of NSW on the biosynthesis of microcystin tailoring and transport enzymes in toxic cyanobacteria ('blue-green algae'), she expanded her research to include a variety of other environmental biotoxins and natural products. She is particularly interested in 'how' and 'why' these 'specialised metabolites' are produced, as well as their impacts on human health and the environment.
Since relocating to the University of Newcastle in 2017, her research has shifted focus to the exploitation of so-called environmental 'toxins' as industrially and pharmaceutically valuable products. Because many natural product producers are difficult to culture and manipulate in the lab, a synthetic biology approach is often necessary to unlock their biochemical potential. This emerging field involves mining microbial genomes for biosynthesis gene clusters (BGCs), characterising the pathways encoded therein, and manipulating and overexpressing these pathways in a heterologous organism, such as E. coli.
Leanne is a member of the Neilan Lab of Microbial and Molecular Diversity within the School of Environmental and Life Sciences, and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology.
Abstracts this author is presenting: