Department of Biochemistry |

Welcome to Susanne Bornelöv!

Susanne Bornelöv joins us from the CRUK Cambridge Institute. Over the years, Susanne's work has covered a range of areas, including histone modifications, functional genomics, RNA modifications, piRNAs and transposable elements. The common denominator has been a focus on molecular...

CF-Trust article on Welch-Group student Jemima Swain’s PhD research

Jemima Swain talks about her about her lab setup for her doctoral research to look at the best way to treat multiple Cystic Fibrosis lung infections at once in an interview she gave to the CF Trust . She is studying the interactions of mixtures of infection-causing pathogens in the Welch Lab, using a continuous flow...

Prize for Alberto Scarampi

Congratulations to Alberto Scarampi on being runner-up for the University's 2024 H E Woodman prize for the best PhD thesis in genetics or biochemistry related to food or agriculture. Alberto did his PhD in the Howe lab , and is now a post-doc with Orkun Soyer in Warwick. His work on the evolution of herbicide resistance...

Marjory Stephenson outside the Department with Judith

Royal Society film celebrates the life and work of Marjory Stephenson

Watch a film made to mark the 80th anniversary of our former faculty member Marjory Stephenson becoming one of the first two female fellows of the Royal Society with Kathleen Lonsdale. It was partly shot in the Department and at Newnham College and features many pictures from the Department Photograph Albums and material...

Howe Group show cyanobacteria can rapidly develop resistance to a herbicide

In a paper published in Current Biology , Alberto Scarampi and his colleagues in Chris Howe's group show that cyanobacteria (photosynthetic bacteria) can rapidly develop resistance to a herbicide thanks to a pool of potentially beneficial mutations already existing at low frequencies in the bacterial population. This is a...

Mairi Kilkenny awarded Pilkington Prize

Congratulations to Mairi Kilkenny, who has been selected as one of the winners of the 2025 Pilkington Prize! The award recognises outstanding contributions to teaching at the University. Mairi's prize citation reads: 'Dr Mairi Kilkenny is an exceptional colleague whose contribution to teaching is outstanding in all areas...

Fig. 5a: Overall structure of the FadE1 acyl-CoA dehydrogenase from PA and differences in the substrate-binding cavities of FadE1 and FadE2.

Welch Group Nature Communications paper finds a new way to treat Pseudomonas aeruginosa lung infections

Dr Meng Wang and members of the Welch Group have been working with colleagues in the Department of Chemistry, the University of Exeter and the University of Eastern Finland to study the biochemistry of Pseudomonas aeruginosa . This bacteria causes hard-to-treat lung infections in people with Cystic Fibrosis and it can...

Miska Group awarded CRUK Discovery Programme grant

Congratulations to the Miska Group on their Cancer Research UK Discovery Programme Award. They will use the award to investigate the role of METTL1 in cancer protein production, oncogenic RNA structure-function modifications and screening RNA structures to identify novel therapeutic targets. Their research aims to...

Protonera addresses the issue of plastic waste

Jack Chengzhi Guo and Florian Hollfelder co-founded Protonera in 2022, together with Erwin Reisner and Subhajit Bhattacharjee from the Department of Chemistry. Watch a video below about Protonera's work to revolutionise waste management by converting plastic waste into hydrogen and providing a sustainable alternative to...

'Hive Heroes', Maori Group Film

The Maori Group have produced a film with their artist in residence, Lily Hunter Green, about their innovative project ‘Hive Heroes’, which combines Art, Science, and Play to reveal the healing secrets of honeybee hives. Learn more about the project here . There will be a pop-up demonstration 11:30am-4:30pm on Saturday 29...

Marjory Stephenson and Dorothy Moyle Needham

Pioneering Cambridge Women Biochemists

To mark Women’s History Month, Stella Butler has written a short piece on our former faculty members, Marjory Stephenson and Dorothy Moyle Needham and the difficulties they faced establishing scientific careers in the 1920s and 30s. Stella is Librarian Emeritus at the University of Leeds and her book, Breaking the Glass...

Two new grants for the Jackson Group

We are delighted to announce that the Jackson Group has been awarded two new grants from Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation . These awards will enable their ground-breaking research targeting voltage-gated sodium channels in a variety of cancers, including breast cancer, as well as pharmacological...

Biochemistry Away Days

Over 90 members and associates of the Department attended our Away Days earlier this month. They braved the cold in the Old Divinity School for a splendid annual get-together. The programme included the PhD Symposium, which featured 20 papers and posters from our vibrant postgraduate community. Congratulations to all who...

Fig. 6: Summary of substrate specificity of MAGT and effect of galactosylation on AcGGM-cellulose interaction

Paper paves the way to convert properties of lignocellulosic biomass for better use

Yoshihisa Yoshimi has published a paper in Nature Communications , ' Glucomannan engineering highlights roles of galactosyl modification in fine-tuning cellulose-glucomannan interaction in Arabidopsis cell walls ' with colleagues from the Dupree Lab and the Universities of Warwick, Jagiellonian and Saitama. The paper shows...

Mark Carrington Retirement

Professor Mark Carrington is retiring after 37 years in the Department. He is pictured here at his retirement dinner at Jesus College, where he was an undergraduate in Cambridge. We thank him for his long service and wish him all our very best wishes for the future.

George Salmond awarded the Marjory Stephenson Prize for 2025

Our emeritus professor, George Salmond has been awarded the Marjory Stephenson Prize for 2025 from the Microbiology Society . Professor Salmond spent his distinguished career studying the molecular genetics of cell division, developing genetic tools to control the growth of bacteria and working on the discovery, analysis...

Paul Dupree is a Highly Cited Researcher for 2024

We are delighted that Paul Dupree is a Highly Cited Researcher again for 2024 . He has been selected for nine out of the last ten years since 2014. According to the selection criteria, each researcher receiving this prestigious award has: 'authored multiple Highly Cited Papers™ which rank in the top 1% by citations for...

New paper shows translocons, and targeting peptides, for four membranes were directly inherited from haptophytes with a new plastid in dinoflagellates

Ross Waller’s lab has published a paper, ‘ Plastid translocon recycling in dinoflagellates demonstrates the portability of complex plastids between hosts ’ in Current Biology in collaboration with colleagues in Ben Luisi’s lab and at the MRC Cambridge and the Cell and Plant Physiology Laboratory, Université Grenoble Alpes...

Fig. 1: Basic properties of the S. cerevisiae MMNs under 6 different growth conditions. From: Minimisation of metabolic networks defines a new functional class of genes.

Designing a Synthetic Biology Workbench: NED and the Magnificent Seven

A paper in this week’s Nature Communications , by Prof Steve Oliver and former members of his lab, reports a major step toward improving the efficiency of industrial microbes. Generating a minimal metabolic network ( MMN ) should improve the production efficiency of engineered microbes by reducing their scope to divert the...

Joshua Lawrence wins prizes for PhD research

Biochemistry PhD student Joshua Lawrence has received the Katharine Burr Blodgett Award for his doctoral research. This prize recognises outstanding work by a recent PhD graduate in the field of colloid and interface science. The prize is named in honour of Katharine Burr Blodgett, who was the first woman to receive a PhD...

T cells killing a tumour cell & LGR5 expression in colorectal cancer

Translational funding awarded to advance novel cancer immunotherapy

Joint funding from the Cambridge Enterprise Technology Investment Fund and Cancer Research Horizons has been awarded to researchers Marc de la Roche (Department of Biochemistry) and Maike de la Roche (Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute).

Claudia Bonfio awarded European Research Council Starting Grant

It is a great pleasure to announce that Claudia Bonfio has been awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant . She comes back to Cambridge from the University of Strasbourg to join the Department of Biochemistry as a research group leader, after previous postdoctoral positions here at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular...

Hosting the next generation of scientists

Today we say farewell to our first-ever A-level student group of aspiring scientists. We have really enjoyed hosting them this week to gain experience of lab work and research life in Biochemistry. More information about the ASTP programme is here .

Adult African Clawed Frog. Photo: Xenbase.

New article on how the Gallop Lab's research can help people with rare diseases

A feature on the Cambridge University website explores the Gallop Lab's research on how the actin cytoskeleton is involved in changing the shape of cells and moving them around as an embryo develops into a fully-formed organism, and how frogs can help people with rare diseases.

Sam Hodder receives Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact Award

Biochemistry PhD student wins social impact award

Congratulations to Sam Hodder, who has won the PhD Student Award for the 2024 Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact Award ! During a clinical placement, Sam developed Chum, a platform using stories and games to educate children about their cancer and treatments.

Department of Biochemistry