News

An article “Interspecies interactions drive bacterial proteome reorganization and emergent metabolism”, recently published by the Patil Group with colleagues in Berlin in Nature Ecology & Evolution, describes how culturing bacteria together profoundly changes how each species behaves. They cultured human gut bacteria species in pairs on a large sca…

The Gay Group have published a paper in Science Advances on “Toll-like receptor signaling outcome is determined by the stoichiometry of the endogenous TRIFosome”, together with colleagues from the Departments of Chemistry and Veterinary Medicine and from Berlin and Charlottesville.Toll-like receptors (TLRs) drive innate immunity via assembly of mac…

We had a packed Jean Thomas Lecture Theatre and three fantastic talks on 28 March for our Biochemistry and AI Cambridge Festival Event.Susanne Bornelöv kicked things off will her talk on ‘Learning the rules of life in the age of AI’, followed by Attila Tokoli's presentation on ‘Teaching computers to speak biology: What ChatGPT’s cousin is doing in …

Charlotte Hutchings (Lilley Group) has just been awarded her PhD from the Department and is joint first author on a paper published in Nature Reviews in Molecular Cell Biology.Together with colleagues from the Science for Life Laboratory at Stockholm and the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University, the Lilley Group has published this revie…

Two former PhD students in the Mott-Owen Group have published a paper in Biochemistry based on their doctoral research. Natasha Murphy and George Tetley collaborated with Jefferson Revell at AstraZeneca to report their engineering of a new generation of disulfide-cyclized peptide inhibitors that target Cdc42 by mimicking the binding mode of its nat…

Dr Francis Krampa joins the Engineering Biology Interdisciplinary Research Centre (EngBio IRC) as Coordinator and Events Manager, bringing a distinguished blend of scientific expertise, operational leadership, and community‑building experience. He previously coordinated the University’s MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise, where he oversaw academic deli…

Congratulations to Jenny Molloy, who has received a European Open Source Award in recognition of her leadership in open hardware and her contributions to open-source practice in the life sciences. Jenny recently joined the Department as a Group Leader and is Head of the Biomanufacturing Group at International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biot…

Cambiotics has successfully closed a Seed investment round of EUR ~4 million with an international consortium, led by the investor Collaborative Fund, with participation from EIFO (Danish Export and Investment Fund), and True, as co-investors.The pioneering biotech company, founded with support from Cambridge Enterprise and the BioInnovation Instit…

Dr Jenny Molloy's Group joins us from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. Jenny is an Assistant Research Professor. She started her research group as a Shuttleworth Fellow in 2018 and now develops a range of open source technologies to enable engineering biology for health and sustainability, alongside microbial and enzyme eng…

Our former PhD student Søren Hough is lead author on a paper published in EMBO Molecular Medicine by Steve Jackson’s Group with colleagues in Birmingham, Mainz, Kansas City, Belfast, Angers, East Jerusalem, London, Bristol, Geneva and Heidelberg.DNA repair and replication are crucial processes in our cells. These pathways help our genome resist the…

Daniel Zeichner, Labour MP for Cambridge visited the Welch and Godlee Labs together with representatives from the Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Trust last Friday 16 January. Martin Welch and Camilla Godlee gave tours of their labs and introduced their lab members, including Isabella Sheldon, who is doing a PhD funded by the CF Trust. They presented their wo…

The Department Away Days took place on 14 and 15 January at the Old Divinity School. We had 6 talks and 12 poster flash talks in the postgrad session, 7 talks in the postdoc session and Jenny Molloy gave the guest talk. The days were a great success. Congratulations to the postgraduate prize winners:Poster Prizes:First Prize: Archibald Coombs (Supe…

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…