Gel electrophoresis

The Cambridge Centre for Proteomics is internationally recognised for pioneering technology that helps us to understand what proteins do inside cells.

We are beginning to tell where proteins live, who with, and how this changes depending on what’s happening to the cell.

Dr Kathryn Lilley

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has been a long-term funder and supporter of the Cambridge Centre for Proteomics (CCP) since the beginnings of this cross-departmental facility almost a decade ago. The large-scale study of proteins, called proteomics, was still in its infancy when CCP first opened its doors to the research community, offering a range of services to separate, identify and quantify proteins in complex samples.

‘Working out what the limitations were with the technology, and solving them, has always been a major consideration,’ explained Dr Kathryn Lilley, who headed the team that set up CCP and is its Director. ‘In fact, two-thirds of the lab focuses on the development of methods, influenced by projects that can’t be handled by the high-throughput pipelines we have in place. In turn, the technical advances benefit the core facilities.’

Techniques being used at CCP are able to identify changes in a cell’s proteins under different conditions, helping colleagues in many university departments including Biochemistry, Genetics, Pathology, Pharmacology and Plant Sciences to answer complex biological questions. The expertise at CCP also underpins research at the Cambridge Systems Biology Centre, and complements imaging methods under development at the Centre for the Physics of Medicine.

In a decade, the technology has progressed immeasurably from the early days of simply providing a catalogue of as many proteins as possible in a sample. Today, more sophisticated approaches such as Localization of Organelle Proteins by Isotope Tagging (LOPIT), developed by CCP, enable the accurate determination of the subcellular location of proteins, and rely heavily on the use of complex statistical methodologies.

‘LOPIT provides a snapshot of spatial information,’ explained Dr Lilley. ‘From this, we are beginning to tell where proteins live, who with, and how this changes depending on what’s happening to the cell. In the foreseeable future, with integration of complementary technologies, we will be able to build three-dimensional dynamic maps of the cell’s proteins, helping us to understand more fully how cells work.’

For more information, please contact Dr Kathryn Lilley (ksl23@cam.ac.uk) at the Cambridge Centre for Proteomics (www.bio.cam.ac.uk/proteomics/).


Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the UK’s principal research funder across the biosciences. Its current Chair is Sir Tom Blundell, who is also Director of Research and Emeritus Professor in Cambridge’s Department of Biochemistry.

Over the past decade, BBSRC has helped achieve a step change in bioscience. Descriptive, single-problem research is increasingly being replaced by generic, predictive and systems approaches, informed by the physical, computational and social sciences. The result is that the UK has kept its world-lead in fundamental bioscience, and enhanced its capability to generate the new knowledge needed to tackle global challenges such as food security, sustainable energy and healthier ageing.

BBSRC research at Cambridge exemplifies this combination of excellence and impact. A grants and fellowships portfolio of over £50 million supports research in more than 20 departments, ranging from predictive modelling of disease epidemiology, the role of short interfering RNAs in cell regulation, data standards and software for macromolecular analysis, to mechanisms of predator vision and defensive colouration in birds. BBSRC also funds around 100 postgraduate research students including some registered with the University at the Babraham Institute.

Cambridge hosts one of six programmes that comprise the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre, which is a £26 million investment bringing together academics and industry to investigate sustainable methods for producing biofuels. Dr Paul Dupree in the Department of Biochemistry leads the Cambridge programme, with partners at Newcastle University and Novozymes A/G, which seeks to improve the release of sugars from plant cell walls. An important resource for the Dupree lab, and many others across Cambridge, has been the protein-analysis capabilities of the Cambridge Centre for Proteomics, a long-term recipient of BBSRC funding.

Research projects requiring ‘big’ science approaches and longer timescales are supported by BBSRC under its strategic longer and larger (LoLa) grant scheme. One such grant to develop a pig super-vaccine was recently awarded to a consortium of researchers based at five universities, including Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine.

Ways to improve the manufacturability of viral vectors for therapeutics are currently being pursued with funding from the BBSRC-led Bioprocessing Research Industry Club.

BBSRC-funded research at Cambridge has also turned into notable innovations. One example is the massively parallel Solexa sequencing technology invented by Professor Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor David Klenerman in the Department of Chemistry, resulting in the spin-out company Solexa, which was purchased by Illumina for $600 million in 2007. The technology is revolutionising bioscience by improving the cost and speed of DNA sequencing by 1,000–10,000 fold on previous technologies. In recognition of this work, Professor Balasubramanian was recently named BBSRC Innovator of the Year 2010.

For more information and to download the BBSRC 2010–2015 Strategic Plan, please visit www.bbsrc.ac.uk/


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