News

A new University of Cambridge feature has been published on the wonderful work in the Howe Lab by Paolo Bombelli, Lucia Giron, Lifu Tan and others to develop biocells that harness the chemistry of algae to power small devices. Read the article.This important research is part of a showcase video of amazing Plants@Cam projects going on in the Departm…

Congratulations to Iva Tchasovnikarova, who is one of the eight Lister Prize Fellows for 2026. Iva will receive a lump sum of £300,000 in flexible funding over five years. The Lister Prize from the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine is one of the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious awards for biomedical researchers in the early years of establis…

Congratulations to Claudia Bonfio, who has been named winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Harrison-Meldola Early Career Prize for Chemistry, for developing biophysical and supramolecular approaches to understand the origins and evolution of primitive cells. She receives £5000, a medal and a certificate.Dr Bonfio's research asks a simple but …

Florian Hollfelder and Timo Kohler have received opportunity seed funding for their research on “Genetic control by transcription factor engineering: a broadly applicable tool for ecosystem science and species conservation”. This project is funded by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) within their Engineering Ecosystem Resilience oppor…

Congratulations to our former colleague John McCafferty, on being elected Fellow of The Royal Society and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. These prestigious honours reflect John’s lasting impact on the biomedical field and his outstanding scientific contributions. From pioneering phage display to helping transform antibody medicines, his …

A film shot in the Department for Google's annual May I/O event features the Luisi Group's research and how AI are tools are assisting in the battle to outsmart drug-resistant bacteria. It also highlights collaborative work done with the Welch Group and the Cryo-EM facility.

Congratulations to the Hyvönen Group on its celebration of a big birthday this week! On Saturday, some 40 alumni came to the Department to celebrate its achievements and to meet old friends and colleagues. Later in the evening the Group, alumni, friends, colleagues and collaborators continued the festivities at Kettle’s Yard.Over the last 25 years,…

Together with colleagues in Parma and Tuscia, Giulia Paris and Ben Luisi have published an article in PNAS, looking at iron acquisition strategies in Staphylococcus aureus. S. aureus is a human pathogen whose virulence depends on iron acquisition. The paper presents the structure of full-length IsdH and identifies a previously unrecognized mechanis…

In a new podcast for Active Motif - Enabling Epigenetics Research, our colleague Iva Tchasovnikarova talks about her career from her early inspirations, doctoral thesis and first publication through to her lab's current work on heterochromatin formation by the HUSH complex and epigenetic control.Find out more and listen to the podcast.

Ben Luisi and Matthew L. Jackson have published a paper in Nature Communications with colleagues from Dundee, Shanghai and Zhengzhou. The study presents 'the cryo-EM structure of the E. coli EmrAB-TolC assembly, revealing how the pump confers multi-drug resistance to antibiotics. The pump structure pinpoints several key residues that are required f…

The Patil group is part of a new collaboration between groups in the US, Japan, Australia, and the UK that aims to understand how changes to our gut microbiome in early life impact neurodevelopment. The project is supported by Wellcome Leap as a part of their Foundation Of a Resilient Microbiome (FORM) initiative. The Patil group will investigate t…

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…