Danny was born in Bromley, South-East London but grew up on the south coast of England in West Sussex. He is the second born of 4 children with 2 Brothers and 1 Younger Sister. Scoops with Danny Mac on Fox 2 – Episode 14 – Brad Thompson, John Kelly. A terrific behind-the-scenes look at the Cardinals 2021 home opener along.

• Danny Mac Os X
• Danny Mac St Louis

Associate Professor

Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
ducatdan@msu.edu

Research: Cyanobacterial Biology and Biotechnology

Cyanobacteria (Fig. 1) are some of the simplest microbes capable of harnessing energy from sunlight and are among the most evolutionarily ancient organisms. Indeed, cyanobacterial biochemistry, acting over millions of years, radically altered the atmosphere and enabled life as we know it on Earth today. It seems therefore fitting that cyanobacteria could be an important component to help us address some of today’s urgent energy and atmospheric problems.

Our lab is interested in using engineering and synthetic approaches to examine the biology and biotechnological application of these intriguing bacteria. Cyanobacteria are thought to be the evolutionary root of all photosynthetic capacity found in algae and plants, so they possess similar light gathering/processing machinery to more complex organisms, including crop species. Yet, cyanobacteria possess the capacity to convert solar energy into biomass with greater efficiency than land-based plants and can be found thriving in much more extreme environments. Indeed, cyanobacteria are the base of many ecosystems where plants cannot grow, including artic lakes, hot springs and salty environments. Cyanobacteria therefore hold considerable promise as an efficient platform for the sustainable production of economically important compounds in a manner that could use marginal land and water supplies unsuitable for growing crops or supporting diverse ecosystems.

We are a young lab with prior experience engineering cyanobacterial strains that can convert solar energy into the biofuel hydrogen gas, or excrete bioindustrially-compatible sugars for downstream applications. Our aim is to continue to utilize traditional engineering and emerging synthetic biological tools to refine our capacity to compartmentalize and control the complex metabolism of cyanobacteria. These tools have allowed us to probe the flexibility of photosynthetic metabolism and generate strains with emergent properties that have broader implications for understanding dynamic feedback and regulation between metabolism and light gathering in green microbes and plants.

For example, we have recently designed a strain of cyanobacteria that can export a significant fraction of the carbon it fixes (up to 85%) as sucrose. This approach is promising as a potential alternative to land-based crops for sugar production (Fig. 2), as this level of productivity could exceed sugar output from sugarcane or corn if it could be scaled. Furthermore, this system also allows us to place a novel metabolic burden on the cell in a tunable fashion and investigate the response – an approach that can reveal aspects of the basic physiology of the system. Counter-intuitively, we have found that these cyanobacterial strains respond by upregulating their photosynthetic capacity and increasing their CO₂ fixation rate to help keep pace with the demand. Understanding this phenomena, and other adaptive responses, could lead to a better understanding of how to poise metabolism for maximal photosynthetic efficiencies and the most effective biological sustainable solutions.

Ongoing projects in the lab aim to contribute broadly in the areas of alternative energy development, understanding mixed microbial communities, and photosynthetic metabolism.

Danny Mac (born 26 February 1988) is an English actor, known for various roles across both stage and screen.

Early life[edit]

Mac was born in Bromley, Greater London,^[2] but then grew up in the seaside town of Bognor Regis.^[3] He trained for 2 years in Acting at Chichester College before attending The Arts Educational Schools in London graduating in 2009 with a BA Hons degree.^[3]

Career[edit]

He played Gavroche in the musical Les Miserables for a ten-week run in Southampton in 1998, and appeared in the role again in the West End in 1999. He performed again in the West End a decade later in the musical Wicked from May 2009, where he stayed for 21 months and was an understudy for the role of Boq. He left to join Hollyoaks in February 2011. In 2016, he reached the final in the fourteenth series of BBC One's Strictly Come Dancing. His professional dance partner was Oti Mabuse. In week 9, after dancing a Charleston, he became the first contestant to both receive a score of ten from Craig Revel Horwood and to score a perfect 40 for the series. The next week, Mac became the first celebrity in the show's history to score a perfect 40 for a Samba.^[4] This was also the earliest double 40 in the show's history. He eventually reached the final, where he finished as joint runners-up with Louise Redknapp and her partner Kevin Clifton, losing out to winners Ore Oduba and his partner Joanne Clifton.

In May 2017, he starred as Gabey in the musical On the Town at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in a production that ran until July of that year and was nominated for Best Musical Revival at the 2018 Olivier Awards. From September 2017 to April 2018 he starred as Joe Gillis in the multi award-winning touring production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, a role for which he won 'Best Actor' at The Manchester Theatre Awards and was nominated for 'Best Actor' at the WhatsOnStage Awards. The production also won 'Best Regional Production' at the 18th Annual WhatsOnStage Awards and 'Best Musical' at The Manchester Theatre Awards.^[5]

In 2018, he appeared as Craig in the Sky One sitcom Trollied. In December 2018 and January 2019, Mac starred as Bob Wallace in White Christmas at Curve in Leicester. The production will transfer to the Dominion Theatre in the West End from November 2019 to January 2020. From May 2019 Mac toured the UK as Nino in the musical Amélie.^[6] In 2020, he played Edward in the London premiere of Pretty Woman: The Musical at the Piccadilly Theatre.^[7] Later that year, he appeared in an episode of the BBC soap opera Doctors as Jonathan Bateson.^[8]

Filmography[edit]

Awards and nominations[edit]

Danny Mac Os X

References[edit]

1. ^'Danny Mac Biography'. Heat. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
2. ^Saunders, Tristram Fane (14 December 2016). 'Who is Danny Mac? All you need to know about the Strictly Come Dancing finalist'. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 16 December 2016.
3. ^ ^ab'Who is Danny Mac? Meet the Strictly Come Dancing 2016 finalist'. wbnews.info. 15 December 2016. Retrieved 16 December 2016.
4. ^Hogan, Michael (27 November 2016). 'Strictly Come Dancing 2016, week 10: Ed Balls cut adrift at bottom – will this be his final hurrah?'. The Telegraph. Retrieved 3 December 2016.
5. ^Duke, Simon (5 October 2017). 'From the Strictly ballroom to Sunset Boulevard – Danny Mac heading to Newcastle in iconic musical'. chroniclelive.co.uk. Retrieved 6 October 2017.
6. ^'Danny Mac to star in Amélie the Musical WhatsOnStage'. www.whatsonstage.com. Retrieved 14 June 2019.
7. ^'Pretty Woman: The Musical cast to feature Danny Mac and Aimie Atkinson in the West End'. www.whatsonstage.com. Retrieved 15 December 2019.
8. ^Writer: Henrietta Hardy; Director: David Lewis Richardson; Producer: Simon J Curtis (17 December 2020). 'Merry Frightmas'. Doctors. BBC. BBC One.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)

Danny Mac St Louis