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A new project led by UCL seeks to develop the plants and food of the future, supported by UK government funding from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).

Professor Saul Purton (UCL Structural & Molecular Biology) and Dr Scott Lenaghan (University of Tennessee) are co-leading a project, supported by an £8.9 million grant, that aims to harness the power of organisms that capture energy from sunlight (photosynthesis) – both land plants and algae – for the sustainable, affordable, and accessible production of valuable compounds for healthcare and manufacturing.

Read the full article here.

TwinsUK is the UK’s largest study of adult twins who have contributed their health data over up to 30 years. Claire Steves, together with twins involved in the studies – Yvonne Haines and Sandra Coles, will talk about how this collaboration between scientists and participants has contributed to understanding of how we can stay healthy as we age.

Happy to announce that Prof. Franca Fraternali as a Keynote speaker this year at 3DSIG/ISMB in Liverpool! Prof. Fraternali will present cutting-edge AI and structure-based strategies for antibody design, from chain pairing prediction to beyond-CDR engineering.

You can still register to attend the conference and stay updated about the latest developments in Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics!

Find more information on the conference: https://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2025/home

Congratulations to Professor Frances Brodsky on being elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the Cellular and Developmental Biology Section of Biological Sciences, in recognition of her outstanding scientific and leadership achievements.

We are proud to see Frances join the ranks of such distinguished individuals whose, in the words of Academy President L.L. Patton, “accomplishments speak volumes about the human capacity for discovery, creativity, leadership, and persistence. They are a stellar testament to the power of knowledge to broaden our horizons and deepen our understanding.”

Frances’s research focuses on membrane traffic in cells, and on the structure and function of clathrin and adaptor proteins that regulate these processes in health and disease.

Find out more about the Brodsky lab: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/biosciences/structural-and-molecular-biology/brodsky-lab/ 

Welcome to the ISMB Symposium 2024! The Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology (ISMB) will hold this year’s biennial ISMB Symposium at UCL’s Bloomsbury campus on Tuesday 25th and Wednesday 26th June.

Traditionally, the Symposium gathers eminent guest speakers and our own ISMB scientists to present talks on the core research themes of the Institute in a two-day event. This year’s programme offers an excellent line-up of speakers, introduced by our postdoctoral fellows and phd students. There will be poster and networking sessions.

The Symposium will close with the ISMB Summer Party in Bentham House on 26th June, 17:30-19:30. Please join us in this opportunity to connect with peers, share thoughts about emerging bioscience research, and be a part of the discussions on our scientific future.

We look forward to seeing you all there!

It is free to attend this event however registration is essential. Please click here to register. Deadline for registration is Monday, 17th June.

ISMB Symposium 2024 Programme and Abstracts

The UCL Faculties of Engineering, Mathematical & Physical Sciences and Life Sciences will lead seven new government-funded Centres for Doctoral Training and be a partner in a further two.

EPSRC has agreed to provide funding for a new Centre for Doctoral Training in Accelerated Medicines Design & Development (AMD&D) (~£7M) with the first student intake scheduled for autumn 2025.

Our CDT will recruit over 50 PhD students to develop the advanced laboratory and computational skills needed to accelerate medicines design and overcome the major obstacles in medicines development. The CDT is a partnership between UCL, the University of Nottingham, and a network of industrial and clinical partners from across the UK pharmaceutical, healthcare and medical technologies sector.

Prof Gareth Williams is the UCL CDT Director and will run the CDT together with UCL Co-Directors Prof Simon Gaisford, Prof Helen Hailes, Professor Rio Torii, Professor Jonathan Knowles and colleagues from Nottingham who are CoIs on the grant.

Read the article on UCL website here.

The Engineering Biology Mission Hubs aim to harness cutting-edge engineering biology research from across the UK to address global challenges from health to the environment. The six hubs will receive up to £12 million each from the UKRI Technology Missions Fund and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

The P3EB Mission Hub (funded with £12.3M) aims to tackle the urgent environmental challenge of plastic pollution and create new ways for the sustainable deconstruction of synthetic plastics as the UK transitions towards a circular plastics economy. The hub will be led by Professor Andrew Pickford (University of Portsmouth), with support from scientists from seven leading UK institutions, including UCL co-investigators: Professor Helen Hailes (UCL Chemistry), Dr Jack Jeffries (UCL Biochemical Engineering), Professor Mark Miodownik (UCL Mechanical Engineering), Professor Paola Lettieri (UCL Chemical Engineering), Dr Andrea Paulillo (UCL Chemical Engineering), Dr Brooks Paige (UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence), Professor Christine Orengo (UCL Biosciences).

Read the story here.

A bid team which included UCL’s Professor Konstantinos Thalassinos has secured £49.35m from the UKRI Infrastructure Fund to establish a nationwide mass spectrometry infrastructure.

Critical Mass UK (C-MASS) will be a national hub-and-spoke infrastructure that will integrate and advance the UK’s capability in mass spectrometry, a technique that identifies the characteristics of molecules.

Mass spectrometry is used across a wide range of scientific research and C-MASS will enable large-scale screening and accelerated data access and sharing.

It will bring together cutting-edge instrumentation at a range of laboratories connected by a coordinating central hub that will manage a central metadata catalogue.

This will enable researchers to enhance their understanding of new materials required for quantum technologies, semiconductors, batteries, catalysts, medicines and more.

C-MASS will also be a critical health resource for the UK, for example by allowing researchers to combine datasets leading to key information about respiratory health from patients’ blood which can be compared with data on air quality.

Professor Konstantinos Thalassinos, academic lead of the UCL Mass Spectrometry Science Technology Platform, said: “I am thrilled by the funding secured for this groundbreaking mass spectrometry infrastructure. This investment will equip numerous labs across the UK with state-of-the-art mass spectrometers, fostering a collaborative approach to tackle significant challenges that are beyond the reach of any single lab.

“A cornerstone of this initiative is the establishment of a comprehensive data hub. This hub will not only coordinate activities but also crucially store data and metadata.

“The availability of such a resource will not only enable us to gain unprecedented insights from the data but will also be instrumental in advancing AI efforts. As we all know, these approaches heavily rely on large volumes of high-quality data, which the C-MASS data hub will provide. By harnessing the power of AI, we can unlock the full potential of this data, driving innovation and discovery in ways we can’t even imagine yet. This is a monumental step forward for scientific research in the UK, and I am thrilled to be part of this journey.”

Further information:

• Professor Konstantinos Thalassinos’ academic profile
• Thalassinos Lab
• Division of Biosciences
• Funding announcement on gov.uk
• UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) investment announcement

Finn Werner’s group published a paper in Nature Communications on 22nd February.

The paper studies the mechanism of how viruses enter and replicate in the hosts cells is of fundamental importance to understand how they cause disease and developing tools for control.

A team of scientists at UCL, led by Prof Finn Werner, have taken a major step forward in understanding how African swine fever virus (ASFV) genes are controlled are expressed. ASFV causes a fatal disease of domestic pigs and wild boar that results in severe socio-economic impacts in affected countries in Africa Europe, Asia and parts of Oceana and the Caribbean.  The lack of tools including vaccines or antivirals limits control of disease.

ASFV replicates in the host cell cytoplasm and uses its own machinery to transcribe its genes into mRNAs which are translated into proteins required for virus replication or modulating host cell function. The UCL team have expressed and assembled 8 proteins comprising the ASFV RNA polymerase into an active complex. The cryo-EM structure of this complex molecular machine was determined providing the information to further probe how it functions to regulate ASFV gene expression. Dr Pilotto says: ‘The production of recombinant eukaryotic RNA polymerases remains the bottleneck for structural studies and high-throughput inhibitor screenings. Our success with the ASFV RNAP represents a game-changer in the field’. The ASFV RNAP bears a striking resemblance to RNAPII – and key differences include the fusion of the ‘assembly platform subunits’ and an unusual fusion with a domain related to the eukaryotic mRNA capping enzyme. Together, the changes represent adaptions to streamline the enzyme to serve the virus best: allowing for efficient RNAP biogenesis, and mRNA expression and processing. The availability of a recombinant functional RNA polymerase will facilitate high throughput screening of antiviral compounds to identify compounds with sufficient specificity and selectivity.

This research will be further developed in a recently funded BBSRC collaborative research project between UCL and The Pirbright Institute (led by Drs Linda Dixon and Chris Netherton). This project will identify other accessory virus and host factors involved in regulating the temporal expression of ASFV genes and the packaging of the virus RNA polymerase into particles ready to start a next round of infection. This information is critical to understand the ASFV replication cycle and potential host factors that may limit virus replication.

Evolution and structure of ASFV RNAP. All DPBB RNAP share a common ancestry (A), the cryoEM structure of the 8-subunit ASFV RNAP (B), and model of the RNAP-capping enzyme complex showing the interaction with the CE (N7-MTase in orange, vRPB7 in blue/magenta) ¹. ASFV research in the RNAP lab is funded by the BBSRC (BB/X015424/1) and Wellcome Trust (108877/B/15/Z).

Reference

1. Pilotto, S., Sykora, M., Cackett, G., Dulson, C., and Werner, F. (2024). Structure of the recombinant RNA polymerase from African Swine Fever Virus. Nat Commun 15, 1606. 10.1038/s41467-024-45842-7.

Full paper can be read here.