Professor Dek Woolfson

Research summary

The primary basic research interests of the group are: (A) the informational aspect of the protein-folding problem; that is, how does the sequence of a protein determine its active, three-dimensional structure or fold?  And (B), how can we use this information to design completely new proteins from scratch?  In addition, we design proteins for applications in synthetic biology and medicine.

We tackle these problems using the following multi-disciplinary approach:

1. We use bioinformatics to garner sequence-to-structure relationships from protein sequence and structural databases.
   
   
2. We test the relationships ("rules for protein folding") that we find in two ways: (a) through ab initio ...

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Biography

Prof Dek Woolfson took his first degree in Chemistry at the University of Oxford in 1987.  He then did a PhD at the University of Cambridge followed by post-doctoral research at University College London and the University of California, Berkeley.  After 10 years as Lecturer through to Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Sussex, he moved to the University of Bristol in 2005 to take up a joint chair in Chemistry and Biochemistry.  His research has always been at the interface between chemistry and biology, applying chemical methods and principles to understand biological phenomena.  Specifically ...

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Links

• Woolfson Group Research Pages

Selected publications

• Fletcher, JM, Harniman, RL, Barnes, FRH, Boyle, AL, Collins, AM, Mantell, J, Sharp, TH, Antognozzi, M, Booth, PJ, Linden, N, Miles, MJ, Sessions, RB, Verkade, P & Woolfson, DN, 2013, ‘Self-assembling cages from coiled-coil peptide modules’. Science, vol 340., pp. 595-599
• Thomson, AR, Wood, CW, Burton, AJ, Bartlett, GJ, Sessions, RB, Brady, RL & Woolfson, DN, 2014, ‘Computational design of water-soluble α-helical barrels’. Science, vol 346., pp. 485-488

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Recent publications

• Shoemark, DK, Ibarra, AA, Ross, JF, Beesley, JL, Bray, HE, Mosayebi, M, Linden, N, Liverpool, TB, McIntosh-Smith, SN, Woolfson, DN & Sessions, RB, 2019, ‘The dynamical interplay between a megadalton peptide nanocage and solutes probed by microsecond atomistic MD; Implications for design’. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, vol 21., pp. 137-147
• Jin, J, Baker, E, Wood, C, Bath, J, Woolfson, D & Tuberfield, A, 2019, ‘Peptide Assembly Directed and Quantified Using Megadalton DNA Nanostructures’. ACS Nano.

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View complete publications list in the University of Bristol publications system