Jones Lab Research Interests

The Jones Lab focuses on engineering microbes to produce high-value chemicals and biomolecules.

Metabolic Engineering

Through a combination of biology, chemistry, and engineering, we innovate novel strategies to improve production in our host organism, E. coli. By applying metabolic engineering principles to a multitude of biosynthetic pathways, we’re able to better understand the transcriptional landscape for the cells and how to push flux toward the product of interest.

Natural Product Biosynthesis

The best things come naturally. That’s why we take inspiration from nature to produce high value chemicals using biology. We work primarily with bacteria to produce a range of natural products with the hope of decreasing the production cost and increasing the environmental sustainability of our target products.

Fermentation Scale-up

In order to enhance the industrial relevance of our work, we frequently leverage our in-house bioreactor capabilities (up to 10-L scale) to validate our best production strains. These studies allow us to be confident in sharing our processes with industry leaders where the technology is further developed into full-scale production methods.