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
David Owen
David Owen
Gerald Rubin
Gerald Rubin
Kim Nasmyth
Tom Ellis
Tom Ellis
Patrick Cai
Patrick Cai
Ben Luisi

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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          David Owen

          David Owen

          Sponsor- Sean Munro, Cell Biology

          David Owen is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow based at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. In joint efforts with a number of other laboratories, his group use an integrated structure/in vitro/in vivo approach to study membrane trafficking along the endocytic system of mammalian cells. This involves trying to understand the molecular recognition processes that occur within, and allow the formation of, the protein coats of tubular vesicular carriers, which move between the cell surface, endosomes and degradative endolysosomes. 

          In collaboration with John Briggs’ group, the structures of minimal AP2/clathrin and retromer coats have been determined by cryo electron tomography: both systems are now being expanded to include more coat components. In collaboration with David Neuhaus’ NMR group, the regulation of both processes is being investigated using a combination of NMR, X-ray crystallography and high-resolution live cell imaging.

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            Gerald Rubin

            Gerald Rubin

            Sponsor:- Greg Jefferis, Neurobiology

            Gerald Rubin is a Senior Group Leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. His research focuses on developing an experimental approach to neurobiology based on the comprehensive identification and manipulation of individual cell types and circuit components. His laboratory uses the tools and methods they develop to study the neuronal circuits in Drosophila underlying learning and memory, sleep regulation, visual perception, sensory integration, and aggression. With Greg Jefferis’ group they are working, as part of a large international collaboration, to determine the complete wiring diagram – or connectome – of the adult Drosophila nervous system and to use that wiring diagram to gain insights into how the brain controls behavior.

            Schretter, C.E., Aso, Y., Dreher, M., Robie, A.A., Dolan, M.-J., Chen, N., Ito, M., Yang, T., Parekh, R., Rubin, G.M. (2020)
            Neuronal circuitry underlying female aggression in Drosophila
            bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.27.118810v1

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              Kim Nasmyth

              Kim Nasmyth

              Sponsor- Jan Löwe, Structural Studies

              Kim Nasmyth currently holds the Whitley Chair at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford and is a fellow of Trinity college. He was a PhD student in Mitchison’s lab in Edinburgh (1974-77), a post doc in Seattle Washington (1978-1980), a Robertson research fellow at Cold Spring Harbor (1980-81), and a member of staff at the MRC laboratory for molecular biology in Cambridge (1982-87) before moving to the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (I.M.P) in Vienna, where he was a senior scientist from 1988 to 1997 and director from 1997 to 2006. His lab identified the cohesin complex that regulates the topology of eukaryotic chromosomes during interphase and holds sister chromatids together following their genesis during S phase. They also elucidated the mechanism by which cohesion is destroyed at the metaphase to anaphase transition, namely cleavage of cohesin’s kleisin subunit by separase, a thiol protease activated through ubiquitinylation of its inhibitory chaperone securin by the Anaphase-promoting complex or cyclosome. Kim’s lab has collaborated closely with that of Jan Löwe for nearly twenty years. Their analyses of cohesin’s structure have led to the notion that it holds sister DNAs together by entrapping them inside a tripartite ring formed by pairwise interactions between its Smc1, Smc3, and kleisin subunits. Their most recent work together has revealed aspects of the complex that enable it to compact DNAs through loop extrusion, in particular the ATP-dependent clamping of DNAs onto top of the Smc1/3 ATPase domains by a regulatory subunit called Scc2 (Nipbl). Kim’s work has been recognized by several awards, including the Gairdner foundation prize and the Breakthrough prize. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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                Tom Ellis

                Tom Ellis

                Sponsor:- Jason Chin, PNAC

                Tom Ellis is Professor of Synthetic Genome Engineering in the Bioengineering Department of Imperial College London and an Associate Faculty member of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Tom obtained his PhD in Cambridge studying the molecular sequence recognition at promoter regions. He then established a career in synthetic biology, leading a group since 2010 that develops tools and technologies for designing and assembling diverse genetic programs into microbial cells including yeasts. Since 2013, he has been part of the Synthetic Yeast Genome (Sc2.0) Project, an international collaboration rewriting the S. cerevisiae genome from computationally-designed synthetic DNA fragments. In collaboration with the Chin and Sale labs in PNAC, Prof Ellis is now developing the methods to achieve genome assembly from synthetic DNA in more complex cells, with a particular focus on chromosome synthesis in human cell lines.

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                  Patrick Cai

                  Patrick Cai

                  Sponsor:- Julian Sale, PNAC

                  Prof. “Patrick” Yizhi Cai received a bachelor degree in Computer Science in China, a master degree in Bioinformatics from University of Edinburgh in the UK, and a PhD in Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Virginia Tech in the USA. Prof. Cai had his postdoctoral fellowship under Jef Boeke in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Prof. Cai serves as a senior scientific consultant to Beijing Genomics Institute, and is the first Autodesk Distinguished Scholar. From 2013 to 2017, Prof. Cai had his own research group at the University of Edinburgh with a prestigious Chancellor’s Fellowship, and his lab focuses on Computer Assisted Design for Synthetic Biology, NeoChromosome design and synthesis in the yeast, and DNA assembly automation. In the summer of 2017, Prof. Cai moved to the University of Manchester as the new chair professor in synthetic genomics. Prof. Cai co-founded Edinburgh Genome Foundry, the International Centre for Synthetic Genomics at BGI, and the GP-Write China Centre at Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

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                    Ben Luisi

                    Ben Luisi

                    Sponsor:- Sjors Scheres, Structural Studies.

                    Ben Luisi is a structural biologist based in the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge. He and his research group study RNA metabolism related to the posttranscriptional control of gene expression. He is working with Tom Dendooven on rules for ribonucleoprotein mediated regulation. In collaboration with Michal Wandel and Felix Randow, his group explored therapeutic oligonucleotides against SARS-CoV-2 during the first lockdown. They also study regulation and assembly of efflux pump assembles and have collaborated with Sjors Scheres and his colleagues to elucidate the structure of a pump by cryoEM.

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