News

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
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When: 9 May 2024, 16:00 — 17:00 Venue: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre Book your place The School of Natural Sciences at Birkbeck are delighted to invite you to this annual lecture in memory of Professor JD Bernal. Established in 1968, this annual lecture commemorates JD Bernal - Professor of Physics at Birkbeck from 1938 and then Chair of Crystallography in 1963. In line with
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The prevalent state of DNA in all cells is chromatin that is made of protein-DNA complexes which are dynamic, complex and heterogenous. The exact composition of the chromatin determines its properties, how it regulates transcription and genome architecture. A breakthrough article by the RNAP laboratory at UCL published today in the journal Nature Communications describes
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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
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Together with the Topf lab at the Centre for Structural Systems Biology (Hamburg), Kish Adoni from the Thalassinos lab has developed a novel pipeline that incorporates crosslinking-mass spectrometry data into AlphaFold2 for improved accuracy of protein structure determination. They found this workflow to be of particular relevance to proteins that occupy multiple conformations. The function
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Professor Helen Saibil's research group published a paper titled 'Structural basis of substrate progression through the bacterialchaperonin cycle' in the PNAS Journal on 23 October 2023. The full paper is available here.

Professor Sanjib Bhakta (School of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Science, Birkbeck) and his research lab has been featured in the The Royal Society of Biology's magazine, The Biologist. Full article can be accessed here.

Dr Joseph Ng and Prof. Franca Fraternali have published the novel method sciCSR to analyse CSR (class-switch recombination) and the antibody response by using molecular data from single B-cells (Nature Methods).  sciCSR allows researchers to analyse in high detail how CSR occurs across time. By building mathematical models to infer CSR events probabilistically, sciCSR can be applied in scenarios including vaccination and gene knockouts and to
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Flemming Hansen’s research group published a paper titled ‘Intrinsic structural dynamics dictate enzymatic activity and inhibition’ in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Journal on 2 October 2023. The full paper is available here.

ISMB's Josie Ferreira was recently awarded the Wellcome Career Development Award. The CDA is an 8 year award for Josie to start her own research group at the ISMB, based in UCL. Josie's award proposal was titled "How does the malaria parasite transform its unique cytoskeleton to ensure disease transmission?" Josie's research uses in situ structural biology
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NVIDIA is hosting an event about AI in drug discovery. Discuss your next AI breakthroughs across topics like drug discovery, medical image analysis, genomics and personalized medicine, and more. The half-day event begins with check-in at 4pm and ends with an opportunity to network with experts at 8pm. There will be demos & learning sessions about
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Vilde Leipart has been awarded Alf Bjørseth's Inspiration Award for her doctoral work, entitled "Understanding the structure-function relationship of honey bee Vitellogenin". Her research examined the protein vitellogenin in honey bees by using artificial intelligence - an article summarising her research was published in the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Full article of Vilde's award can
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