Dr Chris Knight
Senior Lecturer

Overview
Experimenting with Evolution
We want to understand the mechanics of evolution. Exactly what molecules change? In what ways are these changes beneficial (or not) to the organism? How does this relate to what happens in populations of organisms? We mostly answer these questions using microbes. This means that our work relates to issues from the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to the roles of microbiomes – the mixed populations of microbes in particular places, from soil to our guts. Microbes reproduce fast enough that we can watch evolution happening in real time on the lab bench. To make sense of what’s going on we use computational models. Our mixture of wet-lab and computational approaches means that we collaborate both with other biologists, contributing quantitative approaches, as well as computer scientists and theoreticians.
Biography
2017 – present
University of Manchester, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Senior Lecturer
2012 – 2017
University of Manchester, Faculty of Life Sciences, Lecturer
2008 – 2013 University of Manchester, Faculty of Life Sciences, Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow
2005 – 2007
University of Manchester, Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre, BBSRC Postdoc with Douglas Kell
2002 – 2005
University of Oxford, department of Plant Sciences, NERC Postdoc on the molecular basis of evolution in the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens with Paul Rainey and the proteomics lab in the department of Biochemistry.
1997 – 2001
Imperial College London at Silwood Park, PhD on ‘The genetics and evolution of body size in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans’ funded by NERC, supervised by Armand Leroi
1994 – 1996
Christ's College Cambridge, MA Natural Sciences, finalising in genetics
External positions
Pool of Experts, Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
1 Jan 2017 → 31 Dec 2022
Research Networks and Beacons
Biology, Medicine and Health (BMH) Domains
Keywords
- Experimental Evolution, Microbiology, Modelling, Pleiotropy, Epistasis, DNA damage, DNA repair, Synthetic biology, Simulation, Experimental Design, Statistics, Genotype-by-environment interaction, Environmental change, Survival of the flattest, Critical mutation rate, Fluctuation test, Networks
Related information
Publications
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Student Theses
UoM administered thesis: Phd
UoM administered thesis: Phd
UoM administered thesis: Phd