Benjamin Bleasdale

I’m a PhD student in the Elliott Group, working in the Virology Section of Imperial College, London.

I graduated in 2009 from the University of Oxford with a Masters in Biochemistry. Between 2009 and 2010 I took up the offer of a position as a Visiting Research Scholar in the lab of Prof Oliver Smithies, at UNC in Chapel Hill. Whilst there I studied the filtration of proteins through the Glomerular Basement Membrane of the kidney, using an array of microscopy techniques and molecular probes.

In 2010 I was awarded an MRC-funded studentship at Imperial, and moved back to the UK that Autumn. My project, supervised by Dr Gillian Elliott, involves studying Bovine Herpes Virus-1 (BHV-1) as a model for alphaherpesvirus assembly and egress.

The project involves a wide range of techniques, including substantial fluorescence microscopy of both fixed and live samples, Electron Microscopy and protein interaction analysis. Our aim is to better understand the assembly pathway of BHV-1, hopefully elucidating mechanisms than will be applicable to human pathogens within the alphaherpesvirus family, such as HSV-1.