News

The MRC Toxicology Unit and Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, AstraZeneca, Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute, and the Mary Lyon Centre at MRC Harwell have been awarded a £3.4 million Medical Research Council Prosperity Partnership grant to fund research into understanding the early safety profile of antisense oligonucle…

Engineering plant rubisco enzymes through high-throughput enzyme assays and cryo-EM (Plant BioDesign PhD Cambridge project)About the ProjectLead supervisor: Assoc Prof Noam PrywesCo-supervisors: Dr Johannes Kromdijk and Dr Michael WebsterPostgraduates will be registered with the Department of Biochemistry, School of Biological Sciences (University …

The Patil Group have published a paper in Nature Microbiology that reports the use of lab-based screening to identify over 150 common industrial chemicals, from pesticides to flame retardants, that have a toxic effect on bacteria found in the healthy human gut microbiome.Very little information is available about the direct effects of environmental…

Back in 1999, Paul Dupree and Len Packman from the Department of Biochemistry with Steve Russell, David Glover, Michael Ashburner and Cahir O’Kane from the Department of Genetics submitted a grant application to the BBSRC’s Investigating Gene Function Initiative. The application included 80 letters from fly research groups all over the UK in suppor…

Congratulations to our faculty members Paul Dupree and Kiran Patil who have both received the Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Award for 2025. This means they have authored multiple highly cited papers which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field and publication year in the Web of Science over the past decade.Kiran receives the award …

We are delighted that our Alkis Seraphim Memorial Lecturer for 2025 is Professor Ben Lehner. Here are the details:Alkis Seraphim Memorial Lecture 2025 - Free to all but booking required hereProfessor Ben Lehner: Mutate Everything! ‘Mapping the energetic and allosteric structures of proteins at scale’Thursday 4th December 4.30pm, in the Babbage Lect…

The Hyvönen Group, together with the Spring Group from Chemistry, Apollo Therapeutics and Sandexis, have published a paper in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. The paper describes the discovery of APL-5125, a highly selective and potent small molecule CK2a inhibitor.This ground-breaking collaboration resulted from a serendipitous finding by the H…

We were very pleased to welcome visitors from the Faculty of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University in China last week. They came to visit the department to learn more about our teaching so that they could take ideas back to their own department.  They also discussed with us a possible agreement for postgraduate student exchange between our two departm…

What makes a parasite a parasite? Is this a reversible condition or are evolutionary trajectories plastic? And what determines this plasticity, or lack thereof?These fascinating and fundamental big-picture questions in biology will be tackled by a team of four evolutionary cell biologists: Carmen Faso (University of Bern), Pavel Dolezal (Charles Un…

A very warm welcome to our new group leader Noam Prywes. Noam grew up in the US and received his PhD in Chemistry from Harvard studying the origin of life and the RNA world. There he became interested in molecular evolution and decided to study the biochemistry of carbon fixation as a postdoc, first at the Weizmann Institute and then at UC Berkeley…

On the 18 September 2025, Chris Howe gave the 5th Tan Sri Leo Moggie Lecture at UNITEN, Malaysia's Premier Energy University, on algae and bioenergy. This prestigious Lecture is named in honour of Tan Sri Leo Moggie, a distinguished former politician and Chairman of TNB, the national energy company.Chris talked about the evolution and ecological im…

We are delighted to announce that James Thaventhiran has been appointed as Professor in the Department of Biochemistry.Over the past year, each of the six Research Themes within the School of Biological Sciences conducted an international search to identify outstanding individuals who would strengthen and enrich our research programmes. James was s…

Many congratulations to Claudia Bonfio, who is one of the 77 early-career researchers to be awarded a total of £120 million to lead vital research, collaborate with innovators and develop their careers as the research and innovation leaders of the future. The UKRI Future Leader Fellowship provides up to seven years of support to enable award holder…

In this Postdoc Appreciation Week we want to say a big thank you to all our postdocs for the brilliant contributions they make to the Department!We are very pleased that three of our postdocs have been recognised by the Cambridge Postdoc Academy. David Russell (Bonfio Group, pictured left) and Lisa Breckels (Lilley Group) are winners of the Level-U…

Congratulations to Pankti Vaishnav on the selection of her research by the Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBoC) Editorial Board as the winner of the 2025 MBoC Early Career Paper Award. MBoC is the journal of the American Society for Cell Biology.The paper ‘Membrane composition and curvature in SNX9-mediated actin polymerization’ was the culmination…