Group Leader, Lori Passmore, is joining Sjors Scheres as Joint Head of the LMB’s Structural Studies Division. Together they will provide strategic management of the Division’s goal to understand the structure, function and interactions of biologically important molecules at atomic, molecular and supramolecular levels, as well as the advancement of techniques and methodology to accomplish this. Lori takes over the position from David Barford, who has overseen the Division since 2015.
Lori began her research group at the LMB in 2009. Her focus is on better understanding the mechanisms of macromolecular protein complexes which underpin key biological processes such as gene expression and DNA repair. To this end, she champions a multidisciplinary, integrated approach, combining structural, biochemical and functional techniques to elucidate the architecture and structure of complexes, to determine their activities and to understand their regulation.
Specifically, her group has investigated how the complexes Cleavage and Polyadenylation Factor (CPF), Pan2-Pan3 and Ccr4-Not mediate the addition and removal of mRNA poly(A) tails. They have identified the proteins required for processing the end of mRNAs, a key event which can dictate mRNA localisation, translation and stability. They also study the Fanconi Anaemia proteins, illustrating how the FANCD2-FANCI proteins act as a DNA clamp, which assists in DNA repair by identifying single strand gaps.
Lori received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry from the University of British Columbia, Canada, before moving to the UK to pursue a Ph.D. at the Institute of Cancer Research at the University of London. She joined the LMB as a Career Development Fellow in 2004, where she worked with Venki Ramakrishnan and Richard Henderson to investigate the structures of complexes involved in initiation of eukaryotic translation.
Lori’s research has been recognised with the Elisa Izaurralde Award from the RNA Society, the Suffrage Science Award given by the MRC LMS, and election to both the Royal Society and EMBO.
The Structural Studies Division
The LMB has a long research history rooted in structural biology. Built on the foundations of John Kendrew and Max Perutz’s Nobel Prize winning work to determine the molecular structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin, the Division has continued to advance its goals throughout the last 60 years, finessing new analytical methods and determining structures at greater atomic resolutions. Today, the Division is particularly interested in examining protein-nucleic acid complexes, molecules involved in cellular transport or motility, membrane proteins, and structures associated with human disease. By its nature, this work produces a huge amount of computational data, and the Division is also pursuing new techniques and instrumentation for analysis and interpretation.
Further references
Lori’s group page
Lori’s LMB Through the Years interview
Structural Studies research page
Scientific Leadership