Molecular Medicine
These images were obtained by Dr Valentina Caorsi using the FILM facility, and were published in the FILM calendar 2010.
They represent different views of skeletal muscle obtained with a Leica SP5 upright microscope. One image was obtained by Second Harmonic Generation and using two-photon excitation at 850 nm to alter the fibre shape. The other images were obtained by using fluorescent labels on actin, on the myosin essential light chain or on myosin's reactive thiol SH1. The 'square' was obtained by photobleaching, to investigate the existence of FRET between two of the labels, thus demonstrating that their labelling sites are less than 10 nm apart.
The Section of Molecular Medicine (MM) was created in August 2007, as a result of the merging of the sections of Molecular and Cellular Medicine and Biological Nanoscience. The Section is housed in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building on the South Kensington Campus of Imperial College. Most laboratories are found on the 2nd floor. MM regroups scientists with interests in fundamental aspects of cell and molecular biology, enhanced by expertise in physiology, biophysics, spectroscopy, single molecule imaging and state-of-the-art microscopies. The work extends research in the basic sciences at the National Heart and Lung Institute.
Current Principal Investigators in the Section include:
- Dr Vania Braga – Cell-Cell Adhesion Signalling
- Professor Nancy Curtin – Muscle Physiology
- Dr Michael Emerson – Platelet Biology
- Professor Michael Ferenczi (Head of Section) – Muscle Biophysics
- Dr Richard Harbottle – Gene Therapy
- Dr Paul Kemp - Muscle Gene Expression
- Dr Birgit Leitinger – Biology of Matrix-Activated Receptors
- Dr Pradeep Luther – Electron Tomography of Muscle Sarcomere
- Professor Tony Magee (Deputy Head of Section) – Membrane Biology
- Professor Miguel Seabra – Membrane Traffic and Disease
- Dr Liming Ying – Single Molecule Biophysics
Research in the section is principally funded from programme and project grants from Research Councils (MRC, BBSRC) and charities (Wellcome Trust, British Heart Foundation and others).
Molecular Medicine Section - July 2009
Eighty six people currently work in the Section (March 2010), including 11 heads of laboratories, 26 PhD students, 23 Postdocs and researchers, 6 technicians and a number of MRes students, visitors and honorary researchers. Section Administrator Peter Moore 020 7594 3175 (Room 360)
Selected publications
Ali BR; Xu H; Akawi NA; John A; Karuvantevida NS; Langer R; Al-Gazali L; Leitinger B. (1 Jun 2010). Trafficking defects and loss of ligand binding are the underlying causes of all reported DDR2 missense mutations found in SMED-SL patients. Hum Mol Genet. 19:2239-2250.
Barclay, C.J., Woledge, R.C. & Curtin, N.A. (2010). Inferring crossbridge properties from skeletal muscle energetics. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 102, 53-71.
Cebecauer M; Spitaler M; Sergé A; Magee AI. (1 Feb 2010). Signalling complexes and clusters: functional advantages and methodological hurdles. J Cell Sci. 123:309-320
Frasa MA; Maximiano FC; Smolarczyk K; Frances RE; Betson ME; Lozano E; Goldenring J; Seabra MC; Rak A; Ahmadian MR & Braga VMM. (2010) Armus is a Rac1 effector protein that inactivates Rab7 and regulates E-cadherin degradation. Cur. Biol. 20(3):198-208.
Ko CW, Wei ZQ, Marsh RJ, Armoogum DA, Nicolaou N, Bain AJ, Zhou AW, Ying LM. (2009) Probing nanosecond motions of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 by time-resolved fluorescence anisotropy. Mol. BioSyst., 5, 1025-1031.
Luther PK, Bennett PM, Knupp C, Craig R, Padrón R, Harris SP, Patel J, and Moss RJ. 2008. Understanding the organisation and role of myosin binding protein C in normal striated muscle by comparison with MyBP-C knockout cardiac muscle. J Mol Biol. 384:60-72.
West TG, Hild G, Siththanandan VB, Webb MR, Corrie JET, Ferenczi MA (2009) The time-course and strain dependence of ADP release during contraction of permeabilized muscle fibers. Biophysical Journal 96: 3281-3294.
