Dr. Ainsley Beaton
Post-Doctoral Researcher
Roe Group Member: 2025 – Present
I completed my undergraduate degree in Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Strathclyde, followed by an MSc in Industrial Biotechnology with the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC), a programme hosted across multiple Scottish universities. My master’s culminated in an industrial placement at Ingenza, where I worked on promoter screening for industrial production applications.
I went on to pursue my PhD in Dr Nick Tucker’s lab at the University of Strathclyde, in collaboration with Ingenza, focusing on improving and genetically characterising industrial production strains of both Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Streptomyces species.
After completing my PhD, I joined the John Innes Centre in Norwich as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Matt Hutchings. There, I investigated various two-component regulatory systems, particularly CutRS and MtrAB, aiming to understand the signals these systems detect and how they function post-signal reception. My research focused on leveraging this knowledge to induce the production or overproduction of secondary metabolites in Streptomyces.
In the Roe Group, my research will centre on the anti-virulence compound aurodox, which has been shown in previous work from the Roe lab and others to be an effective inhibitor of type III secretion systems (T3SS) and a promising therapeutic candidate against enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) infections. Specifically, my work involves elucidating the precise mechanisms of aurodox’s inhibition of T3SS and studying regulatory pathways in the aurodox-producing strain Streptomyces goldinensis, with a view to enhancing aurodox production
