Prof So Iwata
Prof So Iwata, the director of the MPL, is the David Blow chair of Biophysics at Imperial, the director of the Centre for Structural Biology at Imperial and also Research Director for the ERATO Iwata Human Receptor Crystallography Project, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Kyoto University, Japan. He is a world leading expert on membrane protein crystallography. He began work on membrane proteins in 1992, and since then, he has solved 8 membrane protein structures. Based on these structures, the causes of some genetic disorders have been revealed (Andreu et al, 1999 and 2000, Fig. 4.). Adopting rational approaches to membrane protein structure determination, he has also been involved in technical developments including crystallisation using an antibody fragment (Ostermeier, 1995 and Iwata, 1995, Fig.5) and a fusion protein (Byrne et al, 2000). Some of these results are summarised in a book chapter (Abramson and Iwata, 1999).
Imperial College Membrane Protein Group Website
Professor Dame Louise Johnson FRS
Professor Dame Louise Johnson FRS is Life Sciences Director at Diamond Light Source. Louise is a co-applicant on the MPL Wellcome Trust grant. As a graduate student, she contributed to the substrate binding studies that led directly to the first understanding at the structural level of the mechanism by which an enzyme achieves rate enhancement. She has had a lifetime’s experience in macromolecular crystallography. Her latest research focuses on protein kinases and their regulation in cell cycle control and in transcription. She also has interests in structure based drug design for anti cancer therapy and the imaging of large macromolecular complexes, including membrane proteins, by electron microscopy. In addition to her role at Diamond; she has been the David Phillips Professor and head of the laboratory of Molecular Biophysics, University of Oxford until November 2007.
More about Professor Dame Louise Johnson
Additional Staff
Dr Gwyndaf Evans is the principle beamline scientist for beamline I24. He is responsible for the developments of methods to improve handling of small and delicate crystals, robotic mounting of crystallisation plates on the I24 beamline and methods for collecting and merging data from a large number of small crystals.
Dr Alex Cameron is the MPL group leader and a Research Fellow at Imperial College London.
Dr Momi Iwata is the MPL post-doctoral Research Fellow. Momi has many years of experience in crystallising and solving the structures of membrane proteins. Momi's role is to train and assist visitors to the MPL, in addition to continuing her own research program on V-type ATPases.
Dr James Foadi is an experienced scientific programmer who is working on developing methods for scaling difficult crystals and handling difficult data such as that produced by membrane proteins.
Miss Tian Geng and Matthew Jennnions are the MPL technicians, They are responsible for the crystallisation robots and for training users and helping them to crystallise their proteins.