The Babraham Distinguished Seminar Series is sponsored by the Babraham Institute and the Babraham Research Campus which is home to more than 50 biotech companies. The seminars are also advertised to the wider Cambridge community. The series will provide exciting science talks by distinguished scientists from across the world in many areas of biomedical interest.
Professor Clare Bryant; Professor of Innate Immunity, University of Cambridge
Clare Bryant is Professor of Innate Immunity at the Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine in the University of Cambridge. She studies innate immune cell signalling in response to Pathogen Associated Molecular Pattern Receptor (PRR) activation during bacterial infection using cutting edge multi-disciplinary approaches (collaborating with mathematicians, physicists, physical chemists and structural biologists) to answer fundamental questions about host-pathogen interactions and how to modify them therapeutically. She also applies these innovative approaches to study PRR-induced inflammatory signalling in chronic diseases of humans and animals. In particularly her work using super resolution and single molecule fluorescent imaging approaches to study Toll-like receptor and NOD-like receptor signalling within cells have revealed novel mechanisms in how these receptors signal. She has been on secondments in Genentech and GSK, has extensive collaborations with many pharmaceutical companies, is on the scientific advisory board of several biotech companies, has a drug discovery project with Apollo Therapeutics and helped found the natural product company Polypharmakos. During the COVID- 19 pandemic she founded, and still runs, the Inflammazoom international on line seminar series.
Pattern recognition receptors include membrane and cytosolic proteins, for example Toll-like receptors (TLRs) and NOD-like receptors (NLRs), which broadly signal by forming large protein platforms or supramolecular organising centres (SMOCs). Understanding the mechanistic basis of PRR signalling has been hampered by limited availability of selective and specific antibodies challenging the robustness of standard cell biology/signal transduction biology techniques such as immunolocalization or immunoprecipitation leading to often contradictory cell population data sets. Elegant structural biology studies have identified how PRRs bind to their ligands in vitro and the protein-protein interactions involved in SMOC formation, but how these proteins behave in cells is only now being studied at a single protein resolution. Here I will show our recent data on TLR and NLR signalling including single cell imaging, single molecule fluoresce studies and cryoelectron tomography to explore the mechanisms of how these receptors signal within cells.
The talk will be 45 minutes followed by networking tea, coffee & cake.
Registration is required.
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