News

Work from Dr Anthony Roberts’s laboratory in the ISMB, in collaboration with Dr Andrew Carter’s group at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge, has determined the cryo-EM structure of the motor protein dynein-2, which transports cargoes and signalling molecules within cilia and flagella. Dynein-2 is fundamental to human development and its dysfunction is associated with short-rib thoracic dysplasias
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Dr Giulia Zanetti's research group has been awarded two new grants. A European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant was awarded for a project which shows how coat assembly can deliver the flexibility necessary to accommodate a wide variety of cargo proteins, and how the process can be regulated. Her focus is on COPII coat, which mediates
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Patterns in Protein Sequence and Structure (Reloaded) This research symposium will be held at Birkbeck in honour of Willie Talyor on 20th September 2019, celebrating 40 years of his pioneering research in computational biology. This symposium will bring together past and current collaborators and scientists inspired by Willie Taylor’s research. For those wondering about the title, this
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New research led by Birkbeck’s Professor Sanjib Bhakta and Professor Ester Boix from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona offers new hope in the fight against bacterial infections and the rise of antimicrobial drug resistance in tuberculosis (TB), a devastating infectious disease which presents a major global health challenge. See the full press release here.

On June 18th the ISMB held its inaugural Future Perspectives Day for PhD students and PDRAs. The opening session (chaired by Snezana Djordjevic) addressed the important issue of Open Access and the changing landscape of research publications, and featured three speakers with different perspectives on the subject: Nonia Pariente, Chief Editor of Nature Microbiology; Catherine Sharp, Head of Open Access Services,
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On a sunny day in June, just before the summer solstice, staff from the ISMB at UCL and Birkbeck had their (now) annual retreat this year at the London Zoo. In our busy lives as academics, these away-days provide us with the rare opportunity to catch up with our colleagues from across Torrington Place in
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A GCRF (Global Challenges Research Fund) International Capacity-Building Workshop to tackle Antimicrobial Drug Resistance in tuberculosis (TB) was hosted by the ISMB-Mycobacteria Research Lab at Birkbeck on 5th July, lead by Professor Sanjib Bhakta. Dr Clare Samson, Senior Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, has written a blog post about the event.

A paper by Professor Neil McDonald's research group, in collaboration with Sir Richard Treisman, has been published in Nature Cell Biology, identifying a new RPEL-family of rhoGAPs that link Rac/Cdc42 GTP loading to G-actin availability. The paper is available here.

Professor Helen Saibil's research group have published a paper titled 'Two-Step Activation Mechanism of the ClpB Disaggregase for Sequential Substrate Threading by the Main ATPase Motor' in Cell Reports in June 2019. The paper is available here.

Professor Bart Hoogenboom's research group published a paper titled 'Quantification of Biomolecular Dynamics inside Real and Synthetic Nuclear Pore Complexes using Time-Resolved Atomic Force Microscopy' in ACS Nano in June 2019. The full paper is available here.

Dr Konstantinos Thalassinos We are the first group to publish a paper on how a new cyclic ion-mobility mass-spectrometry (cIMMS) device, manufactured by Waters, can be used to probe protein structure and dynamics. In particular, the tandem ion mobility capabilities of the instrument allow us to probe in very fine detail protein unfolding pathways and for
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Professor Maya Topf's research group published a paper titled 'Protein interactions and consensus clustering analysis uncover insights into herpesvirus virion structure and function relationships' in Plos Biology on 14th June. The full paper is available here.