Representatives from the French Embassy visited University labs on 10 December to see some of the innovative COVID-19 research being undertaken at Bristol, including work on ADDomer™, a thermostable vaccine platform being developed by Bristol scientists to combat emerging infectious diseases.

Dr Rachel Millet and Arthur Belaud from the Embassy’s Innovation Branch, which seeks to drive France-UK business enterprise, met with scientists Professor Imre Berger and Frederic Garzoni, founders of Imophoron Ltd, the biotech start-up developing ADDomer that uses technology developed at an institution in France, and recently secured £4 million investment.

During the visit, the delegation took a tour of labs in the University’s Max Planck-Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology (MPBC), the GW4/Wellcome Trust Cryo-EM facility led by Prof Christiane Schaffitzel, and Science Creates, the Bristol-based incubator, which is operated in partnership with the University and supports scientists and engineers in commercialising ground-breaking innovations. Having recently opened its second facility in the city’s Old Market, the party met with Science Creates founder and Bristol graduate Dr Harry Destecroix to discuss the future of deep-tech eco-systems.

Professor Imre Berger, Director of Bristol’s Max Planck Centre for Minimal Biology, said: “We are honoured to host this visit from the French Embassy’s Innovation Branch to share knowledge and showcase the pioneering research that is being done in collaboration with our European colleagues and institutions.”

Press release issued: 10 December 2021 on University of Bristol News and Features~ article here.

On Wednesday 2 September, the German Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, Andreas Michaelis, paid a visit to the University of Bristol. Michaelis came to discuss with University representatives the opportunities to collaborate with Germany across research, education and mobility. The visit was a significant step in building and fostering the University’s relationship with the new Ambassador, in his first official trip to the UK outside of London.

The delegation toured the Max Planck Centre for Minimal Biology in the School of Chemistry and the GW4 Facility for High-Resolution Electron Cryo-Microscopy in the Life Sciences Building. Established in 2019, the Max Planck Bristol Centre consists of Directors based in both Bristol and Germany in a truly interdisciplinary and international partnership, set up by the University of Bristol and the Max Planck Society. The Centre pursues game-changing research and postgraduate training in the emerging field of minimal biology to address some of the most complex challenges in fundamental science.

The GW4 Facility for High-Resolution Electron Cryo-Microscopy is closely aligned with the Wolfson Bioimaging Facility and provides world class cryo-microscopy and analysis tools, enabling researchers from diverse disciplines across the Great West region and beyond to study molecular processes using single-particle cryo-EM or cryo-tomography.

Director of the Max Planck Bristol Centre, Imre Berger, discussed the importance of international cooperation in science with Herr Michaelis on his tour of campus. The German delegation also met with Bristol Heads of School and Pro Vice-Chancellors, as well as members of the Bristol Max Planck and Cryo-EM facilities to observe our joint Europe-Bristol research endeavours. The Pro Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement Erik Lithander

said: “We were delighted to be able to welcome the Ambassador to the University to have the opportunity to showcase some of the terrific research being done in collaboration with German colleagues and institutions. The University of Bristol is determined to keep European collaboration at the centre of its research strategy, and opportunities such as the Ambassador’s visit are an excellent way to accentuate this.”

Taking De Novo Protein Design And Assembly Into Bacterial Cells

Click here to apply.

Application deadline: Monday 2nd December 2019 (Midnight)
Host Institution: University of Bristol
Commencing: September 2020
Main Supervisor: Prof Dek Woolfson
Second Supervisor(s): Prof Nigel Savery and Prof Paul Verkade

Advancing the frontiers of bioscience discovery, the South West Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership (SWBio DTP) aims to provide PhD students with outstanding interdisciplinary research training.

Project Description:

De novo protein design is the process of building entirely new protein sequences to adopt stable structures from scratch, and programming these further to perform desired functions. It is distinct from protein engineering, which aims to improve the stabilities and functions of natural proteins for given applications. In basic science, de novo protein design is the acid test of our understanding of sequence-to-structure/function relationships of natural proteins. In frontier bioscience, it presents possibilities for generating protein structures not yet observed in nature, i.e. the so-called ‘dark matter of protein-structure space’ (Woolfson et al., (2015) Curr Opin Struct Biol 33 16). In applied science and biotechnology, it offers routes to hyperstable proteins with functions not performed by natural proteins.

Over the past 5 – 10 years, protein designers’ abilities to deliver stable de novo proteins that fold and assemble as prescribed has advanced considerably. This has come through improvements in our understanding of sequence-to-structure relationships in proteins, advances in computational design methods, the reduced cost of synthetic peptides and genes, and increased speeds of high-throughput screening of protein libraries. These advances set new targets for the field of de novo protein design. One of these challenges is to take de novo proteins directly into cells to enhance and augment natural biological systems.

Our research groups—Woolfson, Savery and Verkade—have worked together for 5 years to help establish this nascent field of ‘protein design in the cell’. Our achievements include the design,
assembly, visualisation and functionalisation of a de novo cytoskeleton in E. coli (Lee et al. (2018) Nat Chem Biol 14 142); and the delivery of a series of de novo protein-protein interactions that operate in E. coli and substitute for protein-protein-interactions domains that control transcription (Smith et al.(2019) ACS Synth Biol 8 1284).

The proposed PhD project builds on these international and local developments in de novo protein design, and the collaborative environment that we have established, to advance protein design in the cell. Specifically, we will take protein-design modules that the Woolfson group has built and characterised to high resolution, combine them to make functional de novo assemblies in E. coli using synthetic-biology methods established by the Savery group, and visualise the assemblies directly in cells using the Verkade group’s expertise in light and electron microscopy. Our overall aim is to design de novo proteins that fold, assemble, disassemble and function on command in living cells.

How to apply:

To submit an application, please click here.
For eligibility requirements, please click here.
For further information, please contact the listed supervisor: Prof Dek Woolfson

ADDomer: Synthetic multiepitope virus-like particle platform for next-Generation vaccines.

Click here to apply.

Application deadline: Monday 2nd December 2019 (Midnight)
Host Institution: University of Bristol
Commencing: September 2020
Main Supervisor: Prof Imre Berger
Second Supervisor: Prof Christiane Schaffitzel
Collaborators: Fred Garzoni (Imophoron Ltd)

Advancing the frontiers of bioscience discovery, the South West Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership (SWBio DTP) aims to provide PhD students with outstanding interdisciplinary research training.

Project Description:

How to apply:

Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology Director Professor Imre Berger, EPSRC SynBio CDT Student Julien Capin, and Bristol BioDesign Institute Scientific Manager Dr Kathleen Sedgley, were invited to present the Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology at the British Embassy in Berlin on the 13 and 14 May 2019.

Russel Group Universities’ UK-Europe Knowledge Diplomacy Reception was opened by Chris Skidmore MP, and followed by a panel discussion Chaired by Dr Julie Maxton CBE, Executive Director of the Royal Society.

The UK and Germany work together more than they work with any other country in Horizon 2020, in fact the UK is involved in over half of all German-led EU bids. Between 2013 and 2017 70,000 scientific publications were co-authored between academics in the UK and Germany, 2,177 (3.1%) of which involved the University of Bristol.

Read more about the importance of UK-German collaboration, and the Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology (page 11) of the Russell Group Knowledge Diplomacy Reception Brochure.

The second event was organised in collaboration between BUILA (the British Universities International Liaison Association), and their German counterpart DAIA, (the Deutsche Assoziation für Internationalen Bildungsaustausch) supported by the British Council and Universities UK International.

The Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology was one of only 10 partnerships selected to to showcase collaborations between the UK, Germany and Europe. Here’s the team with University of Bristol’s Director International, Caroline Baylon.

Read the full ‘Better together’ news item