Biosciences Staff Profile

List of selected recent publications, view full publication list on Google Scholar or in the Kent Academic Repository

What are the mechanisms that govern the formation of amyloid protein structures associated with human diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, Prion diseases and systemic amyloidosis? This is a question of fundamental biological importance, and the focus of the research in my lab.

Amyloid fibrils are highly ordered protein assemblies with the cross-beta structure consisting of continuous beta-sheets running through the core of amyloid fibrils perpendicularly to the fibril axis. Not all amyloid assemblies are associated with disease as some have been recognised as functional amyloids that can play a number of important roles in organisms ranging from bacteria and yeast to humans. My research interests and expertise are in structural biology, biochemistry, chemical biology, biophysics and computational biology of protein assembly, protein folding, protein misfolding, amyloid and prions. My research is focused on resolving the lifecycle of amyloid protein assembly using experimental, computational and theoretical approaches, including AFM/EM imaging, spectroscopy, kinetics, recombinant protein production, yeast molecular biology and cell biology methods.

Dr Wei-Feng Xue joined the school of Biosciences in 2011 as Lecturer in Chemical biology, and he is now Senior Lecturer in Chemical biology since 2014. He received his PhD degree in Physical Chemistry on research regarding protein-protein/protein-ligand interactions in Prof. Sara Linse’s group at Lund University in Sweden (2006). He then went on to do postdoctoral research concerning the mechanism and the biological impact of amyloid assembly in Prof. Sheena Radford’s laboratory at the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology in the University of Leeds (2006-2011). His research interests include supramolecular protein assembly, protein folding and misfolding, amyloid and prions, and AFM imaging.

Wei-Feng is a member of the Kent Fungal Group, the Protein Form and Function Group and the Industrial Biotechnology Centre

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6504-0404

Dr Martin Carden joined the School of Biosciences in 1988. He is a member of the Industrial Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology Group.

Degrees held

1979 BSc Physiology, University of London
1983 PhD Biophysics, University of London

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-0609-4605

Dr Alessia Buscaino graduated in Molecular Biology at the University of Palermo (Italy) in 2000.

She conducted her PhD research in the laboratory of Dr. Asifa Akhtar at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-Germany) research institute. During her PhD, her interest in epigenetics and chromatin modifications flourished while investigating mechanisms of Dosage Compensation in Drosophila melanogaster. In 2005, Dr Buscaino was awarded an EMBO long-term post-doctoral fellowship to conduct research in the laboratory of Professor Robin Allshire (WTCCB-Edinburgh). During her post-doc she investigated how heterochromatin assembles on large blocks of DNA repeats in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe.
In 2013, she obtained a EMBO short-term Fellowship to investigate the chromatin status of Candida albicans repetitive DNA elements in Judith Berman laboratory (TAU University- Tel-Aviv, Israel).

Dr Alessia Buscaino is a Senior Lecturer in Fungal Epigenetics.
Dr Buscaino’s group aim to understand how epigenetic mechanisms control fungal pathogenicity and anti-fungal drug resistance. Within these areas the group focuses on understanding how chromatin structure regulates adaptation and genome instability in Candida albicans, the most common human fungal pathogen.

Dr Buscaino’s research group belongs to the “Infection and Drug Resistance Research Group” and to the “Reproduction, evolution and genomics” research group.

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1704-3168

David joined the School of Biosciences in October 2011. He obtained his first degree in Biophysics at the University of Leeds in 1998 and then went on to study for his PhD in Structural Biology at the Institute of Cancer Research studying drug/DNA interactions. David then was awarded an SERC personal fellowship to focus on drug discovery at Kings College University of London where he worked on structural studies of complexes of inhibitors of Thymidine Kinase from Herpes Simplex Virus.

He then spent 15 years at Pfizer working on a large number of drug discovery programmes for a wide range of disease areas including Cardiovascular, Tissue Repair, Sexual Health, Allergy and Respiratory, Antifungals, Antivirals. David became Director of Structural Biology and Biophysics Group which utilised techniques such as NMR, X-ray crystallography, Mass Spectrometry, ITC and SPR to investigate protein structure and function and elucidate mode of action of ligand binding. During his time at Pfizer David solved the first structure of a Phosphodiesterase (PDE5 – the biological target of Viagra) which was a novel enzyme class to understand the function, mechanism and modes of inhibition. David is a member of the Protein Form and Function Group.

ORCID ID:0000-0003-4605-4779

Dr Ian Blomfield joined the School of Biosciences in April 1999. He is a member of the Microbial Pathogenesis Group and the Centre for Biomedical Informatics. Work in the Blomfield group is focused on understanding how and why genes expression is controlled in bacteria, with an emphasis on virulence factors in E.coli.

Dr Anthony Baines is a member of both the Cell Biology, Cancer Targets and Therapies Group and the Industrial Biotechnology Centre

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5428-6479