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Overview

Professor Jonathan Heddle

Professor


Affiliations
Affiliation
Professor in the Department of Biosciences

Biography

I received my DSc. (Habilitation) from the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, my Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Leicester, and a B.Pharm (Hons) from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.

 

I carried out research at the John Innes Centre, UK and spent over a decade in Japan engaged in academic teaching and investigational research, and I was responsible for laboratories at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and RIKEN, Japan’s largest comprehensive scientific research institution.

 I served as an Extraordinary Professor at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology (MCB), at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. I have more than 20 years of experience in researching natural and artificial bionanomachines and have made significant contributions to the understanding of DNA gyrase an important antibacterial target, playing a major role in designing novel artificial structures from DNA and proteins including nanorobotic DNA boxes, protein nanotubes and protein cages. I am also a founder of nCage Therapeutics, a spinout from our academic work which is developing novel protein structures and therapeutics.

I was awarded the Leverhulme Trust International Professorship to set up the Centre for Programmable Biological Matter at Durham University. My group's research focus is on understanding and building natural and artificial biological nanomachines. We are interested in using biochemical, biophysical and structural biology tools to understand complex machine-like enzymes and use the same tools to investigate the function of artificial nanosystems which are built from protein, nucleic acid and lipid components.

Publications

Chapter in book

Journal Article

Supervision students