Sarah O'Connor
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| Nationality | American |
| Known for | plant biosynthesis, enzymology, mutagenesis |
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| Institutions | John Innes Centre, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology |
| Doctoral advisor | Barbara Imperiali |
| Website | https://www.sarahoconnor.org/ |
Sarah E. O'Connor FRS is an American molecular biologist working to understand the molecular machinery involved in assembling important plant natural products – vinblastine, morphine, iridoids, secologanin – and how changing the enzymes involved in this pathway lead to diverse analogs. She was a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre in the UK between 2011 and 2019. O'Connor was appointed by the Max Planck Society in 2018 to head the Department of Natural Product Biosynthesis at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, taking up her role during 2019.[1]
O'Connor received her Ph.D. working with Barbara Imperiali on conformational effects induced by large proteins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[2] She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, where she worked on epothiolone biosynthesis with Professor Christopher T. Walsh.[3] She later returned to MIT as a professor from 2003 to 2010.
O'Connor's work involves detailed study of many important species of medicinally-relevant plants: Rauvolfia serpentina, Catharanthus roseus, and Aspergillus japonicus. Her lab utilizes bioinformatics and enzyme characterization to uncover new pathways by which plants construct these molecules. Insertion of new enzymes, for example a halogenase[4] or oxidase[5] results in novel variants of the molecules not found in nature.
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