Pembroke Fellows Prof. Andrew Baldwin and Prof. Ben Davis FRS Publish Paper in ‘Science’

Professor Andrew Baldwin (Pembroke Frank Buckley Fellow in Chemistry) and Professor Ben Davis FRS (Pembroke Fellow and Tutor in Organic Chemistry) have released a research paper featuring collaborative work.

Published in ‘Science’ on 22nd September, the paper is entitled ‘Posttranslational mutagenesis: A chemical strategy for exploring protein side-chain diversity’.

Prof. Davis commented: ‘We hope that [posttranslational mutagenesis] might become a general method for what you could call 'protein editing'. The idea of editing proteins with Chemistry was really first proposed by a pioneering scientist at the Weizmann Institute called Meir Wilchek some 50 years ago. Our new work builds the most important bonds in biology, the C-C bonds. Although much emphasis in science at the moment is on editing DNA, it's really the proteins that do most of the real work and so we think this is perhaps a more important challenge.’

Commenting on his collaboration with Prof. Andrew Baldwin, he continued: ‘I think it's a real testament to the collaborative environment at Pembroke that Andrew and I get time and space to develop such speculative stuff. Tutors' lives are increasingly busy but the College's support allows us to focus on the best of both teaching and research.’