Tuomas Knowles, has been awarded a 1.5 million Euro Starting Grant from the European Research Council to work on studying the physical properties of heterogeneous protein complexes using microfluidic technologies.
The study of heterogeneous protein systems by conventional means is very challenging since most current biophysical methods perform best for pure solutions of isolated components - yet proteins exert in the vast majority of cases their biological functionality through forming complexes. The project will focus on steps to address this challenge by developing new microfluidic chip architectures for measuring the key physical properties such as molecular weight, stoichiometry and charge of protein complexes. Using this approach, biological problems of fundamental and practical importance characterised by heterogeneity will be explored, including functional chaperone complexes, formation and detection of amyloid oligomers and studies of complex biomolecular mixtures.
For more information on the group and contact details please see Tuomas' website
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-identify-molecular-trigger-for-alzheimers-disease
Tuomas Knowles is a Reader in Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge and Fellow of St. John’s College.