Giulia Zanetti, Head of the Membrane Architecture Laboratory at the Crick, UCL and Birkbeck College, has been awarded £1.2m from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to use advanced microscopy techniques to understand complex secretory processes inside animal cells.
Full article can be read here.
The Wallace Group has recently received a 3-year grant from the Rosetrees
Trust for work on: ‘“Seeing” General Anaesthetics Bound to Sodium
Channels: Using Novel Structure/Function Information for Molecular
Understanding and Design, Enabling Improved Function and Safety’ – a
collaboration with Professor Hugh Hemmings’ Lab at the Weill Cornell Medical
Centre in New York.
Dr Salvador Tomas has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant to study and develop lipid vesicle-based, stimuli-responsive nanoreactors
Lipid vesicles resemble empty cells, a starting point where to build up programmable cell-like robots by the step-wise addition of molecular machinery. Developing such robots requires that we understand how chemical transformations are influenced by confinement within the boundaries of lipid vesicles. Dr Tomas research group has recently reported evidence that confinement promotes the very chemical reactions that enable the assembly of complex molecular machinery, essential to the function of natural and artificial cells. The aim of the project is to characterise rigorously this confinement effect and to exploit it to build cell-like devices programmed to perform chemical reactions in response to specific external stimuli.
More information about Dr Tomas’s research can be found on his ISMB profile.
The CCP-SAS project performs molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo atomistic analyses of X-ray and neutron scattering data from Diamond, ISIS, ESRF, ILL and other facilities. This has been running since 2013 and currently has about 600 users from which there are over 50 publications.
The EPSRC grant to Prof Steve Perkins that initiated this project has been extended through the award of a new EPSRC Impact award. This will see the installation of the SASSIE workflow on HPC platforms at UCL, thus making this more widely available at UCL.
A new paper by Osborne et al (2018) illustrates the power of this new approach to clarify the molecular mechanism of complement Factor H.
Osborne AJ, Nan R, Miller A, Bhatt JS, Gor J & Perkins SJ (2018) Two distinct conformations of factor H regulate discrete complement-binding functions in the fluid phase and at cell surfaces. J. Biol. Chem. 293, 17166-17187. Pubmed 30217822
November 2018
Read Professor Carolyn Moores blog about the the new Titan Krios microscope here.
October 2018
Congratulations to Dr Alan Lowe and Dr Konstantinos Thalassinos on being awarded a BBSRC grant for the project, Reverse engineering cell competition using automated microscopy and recurrent neural networks, a collaboration with Guillaume Charras from the London Centre for Nanotechnology.
Congratulations to Professor Andres Ramos on being awarded an MRC Programme grant for the project: ‘Molecular mechanisms regulating mRNA transport and local translation in neurons‘.
The research will investigate the crucial role played by RNA binding proteins in the regulation of the transport and translation of mRNAs in dendritic and axonal locations. The regulation of mRNA translation in space and time creates distinct local biochemical environments in the cell, which are essential in mediating inter-neuronal communication and establishing neuronal networks.
This MRC programme is a collaboration between groups at ISMB, the UCL Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, the Francis Crick Institute, the UCL Institute of Neurology and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The grant will run from 2018 to 2023.