MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

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LMB Fellows

The LMB Fellows scheme aims to facilitate or enhance long-term collaborations between scientists from across the world and LMB and its groups. LMB Fellowships are sponsored by a group, they are time limited and provide the Fellows with access to the LMB and its facilities, making the Fellows highly valued members of the LMB’s scientific community.

Caroline Dean

Wanda Kukulski

Gillian Griffiths

paul lehner
Paul Lehner

Caroline Dean

Sponsor:- Mariann Bienz, PNAC

Caroline Dean works at the John Innes Centre (Norwich) on epigenetic regulation of developmental control genes in Arabidopsis. This depends on heritable chromatin-associated complexes that are highly conserved between animals and plants such as Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2). Her focus has been on FLC, whose expression determines the timing of flowering after cold spells (1). She has discovered several components of this epigenetic switch by genetic screens, including the VIN/VEL proteins. These proteins form punctate nuclear structures upon overexpression in plant and animal cells, similar to the Wnt signalosomes assembled by Dishevelled through dynamic head-to-tail polymerization of its DIX domain (2). Our collaboration is aimed at the biochemical and structural analysis of VIN/VEL proteins and their domains, to test whether VIN/VEL proteins polymerise, and whether this underpins PRC2 recruitment and heritable epigenetic switching.

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    Wanda Kukulski

    Sponsor:- Madeline Lancaster, Cell Biology

    Wanda Kukulski is Professor of Biochemistry at the Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her group is interested in the diversity of specialised membrane architectures that drive cellular functions. At present, their aim is to understand the molecular organisation and function of organelle contact sites, and dynamic reorganisations of mitochondrial membranes. The core approach is to visualise membrane shape and topology as well as protein assemblies associated with cellular membranes by correlative microscopy and electron cryo-tomography.

    With Madeline Lancaster’s group they are working on combining correlative microscopy with cerebral organoid technology. They aim to visualise molecular architectures in neuronal tissue, which will allow specific questions on organelle membranes in neurons to be addressed.

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      Gillian Griffiths

      Sponsor:- Emmanuel Derivery, Cell Biology

      Gillian Griffiths is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow based at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. Her research is focused on understanding the cell biology of cytotoxic T lymphocytes, key cells of the immune system that destroy virally infected and cancer cells. She identified a novel role for the centrosome in directing secretion of modified secretory lysosomes and has identified many of the proteins involved in this process by studying immunodeficiencies. Recent research has taken advantage on new advances in high resolution imaging to study the remarkable polarisation that these cells undergo when they encounter their targets. She is currently collaborating with Manu Derivery to use micropatterned surfaces to follow T cell polarisation and James Manton in using Light Sheet microscopy.

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        paul lehner

        Paul Lehner

        Sponsor:- Felix Randow, PNAC

        Paul Lehner is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Honorary Consultant in Infectious Diseases at the CITIID Institute in the Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge. His research focuses on the use of genetic and quantitative proteomic approaches to understand how viruses interact with and manipulate their host cells. His application of forward-genetic screens discovered the Human Silencing Hub ‘HUSH’, the critical transcriptional epigenetic repressor complex for silencing both newly integrated retroviruses and mobile endogenous retrotransposons. His collaboration with Felix Randow will take advantage of their complementary expertise to gain mechanistic insights into microbial pathogenesis using genetic and proteomic discovery platforms. They anticipate the discovery of common themes by which different pathogens exploit cellular pathways to overcome cell autonomous immunity and evade cellular recognition.

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