Alex Whitworth leads one of three academic teams in Cambridge involved in a new collaboration set up through the Milner Therapeutics Consortium.
In a research article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, Tobias Spikes, Martin Montgomery and John Walker have shown how the mobility in the interfaces between monomers in dimeric bovine ATP synthase participates in forming the characteristic and ever-changing ultrastructure of inner mitochondrial membranes. This article has been selected by the PNAS as a research highlight.
The Cambridge Festival will be taking place online this year - from 26 March until 4 April.
The MRC MBU's contributions will be accessible via this webpage.
A collaborative research project led by Professor Judy Hirst at the MBU, working with Mike Murphy (MBU) and Thomas Krieg (Medicine), provides important new insights into the cell damage that occurs during heart attacks. This work, published in Nature Communications with MBU PhD student Zhan Yin as first author, focuses on a version of mitochondrial complex I that contains a single amino acid mutation.
Inspired by a collaborative review by James Stewart (Cologne) and Patrick Chinnery, published in September 2020, Nature Reviews Genetics has chosen an image designed by Patrick Morgan for its February 2021 cover.
Venki Ramakrishnan (MRC LMB) and his research group, in a collaboration with Michal Minczuk, obtained cryo-EM structures of mitorobosomes purified from human cell line known to have a high propensity for ribosome stalling. This cellular model was generated by Michal’s group as a part of the PhD project of Sarah Pearce.
Pedro Guiomar has been awarded the Milo Keynes Prize for the academic year 2019–20, in recognition of the very high quality of his PhD thesis entitled “The role of RNA modifications in mitochondrial translation”.
The Milo Keynes Prize is awarded by the Degree Committee for the Faculties of Clinical Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, on behalf of the Director of Postgraduate Education for the School of Clinical Medicine.
From the Regius Professor of Physic and Dr Rob Buckle, Chief Science Officer at the MRC
On behalf of the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the University of Cambridge, we are delighted to announce that Professor Judy Hirst has been appointed as the next Director of the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit. Judy has been the Interim Director since 1 April 2019 when Professor Massimo Zeviani stepped down.
This week, 13-19 September 2020 is World Mitochondrial Disease Week.
An initiative of International Mito Patients (IMP), World Mitochondrial Disease Week raises awareness of mitochondrial disease (mito) on a global scale through educational, fundraising and advocacy activities.
As we have not been able to organise any live events for this week, we have compiled a short presentation of our annual "Wear it Green" and "Bake it Green" activities held in previous years.
Tobias Spikes, Martin Montgomery and John Walker have solved the atomic resolution structure of dimeric ATP synthase from bovine mitochondria by cryo-electron microscopy.
The ATP synthases are complex molecular machines embedded in the inner membranes of mitochondria where they produce almost all the ATP required to sustain life by a mechanical rotary action. Single ATP synthases associate into dimers and form long rows, influencing the formation of characteristic cristae which change shape constantly.
