School of Biosciences

Research Overview

The main focus of my research group is exploring the structural and functional plasticity of proteins. Our research involves the study of specific protein systems (e.g. intracellular subtilisins), conformational switching (e.g. lipoyl domain misfolding), construction of artificial protein scaffolds (e.g. novel molecular switches) and synthetic biology (e.g. expanded genetic code). Both rational protein engineering and directed evolution are used to create new proteins and structural biology, molecular dynamics, biophysics and biochemistry are used to investigate the properties of these novel proteins. We have also recently developed several transposon-based methods for the directed evolution of proteins using non-homologous recombination.

Research Division

Molecular Biosciences