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 Biology and the Department of Chemistry.
Dr Bonfio said, ‘I am absolutely thrilled to be awarded this unique grant supporting our fundamental research on cell membranes and their origins. This success is owed to the enthusiasm, hard work and support of my amazing team and colleagues. It is an incredible opportunity to work on longstanding questions and explore radical ideas.’
Claudia is one of 494 young scientists and scholars from across Europe to receive this prestigious award, sharing total funding of €780 million. The grants support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, from life sciences and physics to social sciences and humanities. They help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas.
The grant supports Dr Bonfio’s research on Lipid Diversity at the Onset of Life, which looks at the origin of cell membranes as a major unresolved issue in evolution. Evolutionary biology points to primitive cells with compositionally diverse membranes that could actively participate in genetic and metabolic processes. However, the assumption that such lipid diversity depends on enzymatic chemistry has generated models comprising compositionally minimal membranes (binary or ternary mixtures of short-chain fatty or phosphatidic acids) that passively host genetic or metabolic processes.
Professor Eric Miska, Head of Department, said: ‘Claudia’s world-leading research to uncover the origins of cell membranes is at the core of the Department of Biochemistry’s vision to understand and harness the molecular principles of life.’
With LipDive, Claudia and her team seek to reconcile biology and chemistry by challenging the critical limiting assumption that lipid diversity cannot be achieved through non-enzymatic reactions. The five-year project will identify prebiotic chemistries that could have given rise to compositionally diverse membranes and show how these support characteristic cellular functions necessary for nucleic acid replication and membrane division, the hallmarks of a cell cycle.