Biographical note - Phil Evans

I did my first degree in Oxford, in Chemistry, graduating in 1969. I stayed in Oxford to do a D.Phil. with Colin Blake in the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics, and determined the crystal structure of phosphoglycerate kinase. In 1976 I moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge where I have been ever since. I worked for many years on the structure, catalysis and regulation of the enzyme phosphofructokinase from B.stearothermophilus and E.coli. This led to a reasonably complete description of the mechanism of catalysis, and the major features of the allosteric regulation.

I worked together with Kiyoshi Nagai here on the first structures of components of the RNA splicing machinery, including the complex of an RNA hairpin with its binding domain from the U1 snRNP (with Chris Oubridge)

I then solved the structure of the enzyme methylmalonyl-CoA mutase, in collaboration with Peter Leadlay in the Department of Biochemistry, together with Nick Keep and Filippo Mancia. This was the first structure of an enzyme that uses adenosylcobalamin (coenzyme B₁₂) as a cofactor.

Since about 1995 my work has concentrated on the mechanisms of the formation of clathrin coated vesicles and related events in endocytosis and intracellular trafficking (see current research page).

Since its beginnings in 1979, I have been closely involved in CCP4, the Collaborative Computing Project in macromolecular crystallography, and have contributed a data scaling program, Scala, to the program suite.