LMB In The News

“Four new projects, announced today, will develop biological methods that offer a new approach to antibiotic production, power generation for extremely small mechanical components, new classes of medicines and innovative techniques to study cell biology. Teams comprising researchers from the UK and elsewhere in Europe will use synthetic biology to design systems with usefully engineered properties that are based on biology, or that use an engineering approach to pick apart a complex biological process…. Dr Philip Holliger will lead a project based at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge with partners from Catholic University of Leuven, University of Bonn and Genoscope in France. The project is to develop synthetic biology methods for producing medicines known as aptamers that are based on nucleic acids (such as RNA and DNA) that have characteristics that are not found naturally.” More…

“The amoeboid movement by which many types of cell crawl across surfaces has fascinated scientists ever since it was first observed using the earliest microscopes. Until recently, it has remained mysterious how cells extend the thin protrusion, known as a lamellipod, that enables them to move forward. In the past decade, however, extensive experimental work has shown that amoeboid motility is associated with the regulated polymerisation of branched actin filaments within the lamellipod. Now, researchers at the London Centre for Nanotechnology and in Cambridge have developed a physical model that explains how this polymerisation generates motion. In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Christian Schreiber (Cambridge University), Murray Stewart (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology) and Tom Duke (LCN) propose that the key point is that the packing efficiency of randomly oriented rod-like filaments decreases rapidly as the filaments get longer.” More…

“In a paper recently published in Genome Biology, Boris Adryan (Cambridge University) and Sarah Teichmann (LMB) have presented evidence that calls in to question currently-held beliefs about how transcription factors (TFs) coordinate gene expression during development to specify the fates of the different tissues in the body.” More…

“On the night he learned he’d won the 1962 Nobel Prize, legend has it that DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick threw himself quite a party: angry neighbors, cops, the works. One of the guests, it seems, had brought a large supply of fireworks to the event, and the ensuing late-night mayhem was rocking the sleepy streets of Cambridge. That guest was Hildegard Lamfrom, an American biochemist from California Institute of Technology, who was working with Crick and several other future Nobel laureates at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Lamfrom was known for her love of a lively party, but she was better known during the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of the sharpest, most tenacious bench scientists in the burgeoning field of molecular biology.” This article is no longer available from the source website: Oregon Health & Science University, 30 April 2010

“Bicycle Therapeutics Ltd, a new biotechnology company developing a novel technology platform for the identification and optimisation of chemically constrained cyclic peptides with high target specificity and binding affinity, has signed a License agreement with the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland and has secured additional seed funding from SR One, the independent corporate venture fund of GlaxoSmithKline, and SV Life Sciences. Bicycle Therapeutics is a spin-out from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge and is based at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge, UK.” More…

“Scientists say some viruses can turn cells into ‘viral hotels’ by exploiting tiny molecules derived from human DNA. The UK study [directed by Cancer Research UK and in collaboration with LMB] found that some viruses can boost microRNA activity to suppress the immune system’s reaction to them.” More…