Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

The commitment to apoptotic cell death is highly regulated. This is achieved by the formation of multi-protein complexes and specific protein-protein interactions, which either inhibit or initiate the apoptosis pathways. Our ability to manipulate these protein-protein interactions for the treatment of diseases such as cancer has been hindered by a lack of a defined model of the upstream regulatory protein complexes. This project will build on published work from the lab, to study the mechanism by which the upstream regulatory protein complexes interact with BCL-2 family effector protein BAK to control commitment to apoptosis. To address this question complementary cell biology and structural biology will be used to visualise for the first time the key multi-protein complex involved in BAK regulation. The detailed structural insight generated will be used to identify and test, via mutagenesis of critical residues in each protein, key interactions which if disrupted alter the cell fate outcome. These studies will pave the way to develop novel therapeutic strategies for cancer to modulate BAK activity to increase levels of apoptosis in response to treatment. <br/>