Protein Moonlighting in Biology and Medicine

Brian Henderson is Professor of Biochemistry at University College London. He started his research career as a cell biologist, migrating to become an immunologist then pharmacologist with six years experience in the pharmaceutical industry. In the early 1990s studies of bacteria-host interactions identified a bacterial molecular chaperone, chaperonin 60, as a potent signalling molecule able to induce osteoclast formation and bone remodelling. This was Henderson's introduction to protein moonlighting and he has spent the past twenty years exploring the roles of bacterial and human moonlighting proteins in human health and disease. Mario Fares is a Principal Investogator in the Evolutionary Genetics and Bioinformatics Laboratory at Trinity College. His research is focused on the understanding of the selective forces shaping the evolution of proteins, proteomes and genomes. Most of the concepts dealt with in his laboratory are related to the field of molecular evolution and the complexity of mutations relationships. Taking these interests and concepts to the level of comparative genomics and proteomics adds the dimension of systems biology to his research. Andrew Martin is a researcher in the Bloomsbury Center for Bioinformatics at University College, London. His research focuses on structural bioinformatics: developing tools to investigate and understand the relationship between protein sequence, structure and function. Within this general area, his main interests are protein modelling, structural analysis, structural immunology, effects of mutation on protein structure and disease, application of relational databases, automation and software development.