Studentship Positions Available

There are opportunities in a variety of different projects and appropriate training will be provided. Typically students will work closely with a post-doc in their first year and will then become more independent after this initial period of training and supervision. Although students will train initially in one of the subject areas below, there is no reason why interested students could not be involved in several aspects of the projects. For more details about specific research areas, return to the main web page, but brief details are given below.

Protein Crystallography

There are a number of crystallographic projects that would be suitable for a student. Most of these will involve proteins that are responsible for different aspects of the replication of DNA in bacteria, although other protein systems are always being studied in the group. Training in this area will be in protein crystallography (including protein purification and crystallisation) and computing.

Molecular Biology and Enzymology

These projects might involve the cloning and expression of novel genes in bacteria, with a view to obtaining structural data. This will probably include crystallisation of the proteins. However, it is also likely to involve other techniques to investigate the domain structure and to dissect the biochemical activities of the protein. Functional domains can then be isolated in preparation for further biochemical and structural studies. Training in this area will be in molecular biology techniques (cloning, PCR, sequencing, etc) as well as purification and analysis of proteins.

These projects might also involve more detailed biochemical characterisation of the enzymology and mechanism of bacterial DNA replication proteins. This will involve many standard molecular biology techniques as well as more specialised methods such as site-specific mutagenesis. The aim of these studies will be to improve our understanding of the mechanism of these proteins.

Web pages maintained by Robert Court