The UK’s dementia research landscape is an impressive and complex jigsaw – made up of funders, research institutes, hospitals, industry, charities and more, all working together for a better future for people with dementia. A new picture, developed by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), illustrates how the jigsaw […]
The UK’s dementia research landscape: LMB is a piece of the jigsaw
Leprosy turns the immune system against itself
An international team of scientists, including Lalita Ramakrishnan’s group in the University of Cambridge Molecular Immunity Unit, based at the LMB, have discovered that Leprosy hijacks our immune system, turning an important repair mechanism into one that causes potentially irreparable damage to our nerve cells. More…
Richard Henderson and Nigel Unwin awarded Gjønnes Medal in Electron Crystallography
The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) Gjønnes Medal in Electron Crystallography has been awarded to Richard Henderson, Group Leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, and Nigel Unwin, LMB Emeritus Group Leader from the LMB’s Neurobiology Division, “for their development and powerful application of structural determination methods for biological complexes at near-atomic resolution using electron […]
2017 Francis Crick Lecture to be given by Jack Szostak
Jack Szostak will give the 2017 Francis Crick Lecture on Thursday 7th September at 4pm in the LMB’s Max Perutz Lecture Theatre. The lecture, entitled “The Surprising Chemistry of Nonenzymatic RNA Replication”, is open to anyone in the local area who is interested in attending. Jack is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and […]
Folate and formaldehyde: from vitamin to genotoxin to DNA building block
Cell growth requires the synthesis of molecules, such as nucleotides to make DNA and amino acids to make proteins. One essential building block of these is the one carbon unit. This is produced by the one carbon (1C) cycle, which requires the vitamin folate and the amino acid serine (the main source of the 1C […]
Amino acid homorepeats influence the function and evolution of proteins
Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Just twenty different amino acids are strung together in different orders – like beads – to build all the proteins in living organisms. When a single type of amino acid is found consecutively within a protein, this is known as a homorepeat. Abnormal variation in the length […]