On Sunday, 24 March 2019 eleven members of the MRC MBU represented the Unit at the Cambridge Science Festival.
Discovering the mechanism of energy production in mitochondria
Massimo Zeviani has announced that he will leave the MBU at the end of September 2019. From 1 October, Massimo will take up a Professorship at the University of Padova in Italy, his alma mater.
With effect from 1 April 2019, Judy Hirst has been appointed as Interim Director of the MBU and she will steer the Unit forwards, until the appointment of our next Director.
Under Massimo’s directorship the Unit has formed strong links between basic science and clinical medicine, and we wish him all the very best for the future.
28 February is the twelfth international Rare Disease Day, coordinated by EURORDIS.
Around this date, awareness-raising activities are taking place all over the world.
The MBU's contribution was a mitochondrial face-painting event - great fun was had by all!
Congratulations to Professor Patrick Chinnery, who has been appointed as the MRC's Clinical Director.
Patrick will play a key role in developing, promoting and implementing MRC research programmes, both nationally and internationally.
Patrick is very excited about the opportunities that this new role presents for the translation of laboratory research into improvements in healthcare.
The full press release can be found on the MRC's news page.
To commemorate the award of an Honorary Fellowship to Professor Sir John E Walker, FRS, FMedSci, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, on 6 February 2019 Professor Sir John delivered The Cambridge Philosophical Society's Honorary Fellows Lecture.
Lecture Title: "The fuel of life"
Abstract
Professor John Walker and his colleagues have solved the first structure of an F1 domain from a bacterial pathogen family, which could lead to the development of new drugs to prevent and cure tuberculosis (TB) to follow on from the recently developed anti-TB drug Bedaquiline which targets the membrane domain of ATP synthase, and is used for treating multi-drug-resistant TB.
ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the fuel of life and is generated in cellular organisms by an enzyme called ATP synthase.
A paper by the Mitochondrial Carrier research group at the MRC MBU, titled "The molecular mechanism of transport by the mitochondrial ADP/ATP carrier" has just been published by the journal Cell.
At 0900 on Thursday, 1 November 2018 Mike Murphy will be talking about Free Radicals on BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time" programme, hosted by Melvyn Bragg.
Other guests are Nick Lane (University College London) and Anna Croft (University of Nottingham).
In a study published today in Nature Communications, a team of scientists led by Professor Patrick Chinnery, Group Leader, Mitochondrial Genomics, has discovered spelling errors in DNA in the human brain, opening the possibility that they cause dementia. The mutations probably occur before birth but could have effects later in life, causing diseases like Alzheimer's.
A study by the Mitochondrial Genetics research group at the MRC MBU entitled 'Genome editing in mitochondria corrects a pathogenic mtDNA mutation' has been published in Nature Medicine.
