Professor Tom Blundell

University of Cambridge

University departments
Department of Biochemistry

Position: Emeritus Professor and Director of Research
Personal home page: http://www-cryst.bioc.cam.ac.uk/groups/blundell

PubMed journal articles - click here

Research description

Tom Blundell's research combines structural biology, structural bioinformatics and structure-guided drug discovery. Most of his work has been on multi-component protein assemblies, first focusing on growth factor relationships with receptor tyrosyl kinases, including FGF: FGFR and HGF/SF:Met. Over the past decade he has extended his work to understanding DNA damage repair signaling, focusing initially on homologous recombination and Non-Homologous End Joining (NHEJ) recombination. Tom Blundell has developed widely used software in structural bioinformatics, including databases databases of three-dimensional structures of proteins (CREDO, PICCOLO, BIPA), software for sequence-structure (fold) recognition (FUGUE) and software for comparative modeling (COMPOSER, MODELLER, ORCHESTRAR, RAPPER). In the past two decades he has become interested in fragment-based approaches to lead discovery and co-founding the oncology company Astex Therapeutics http://www.astex-therapeutics.com.

Research Programme or Virtual Institute
Urological Malignancies Virtual Institute
Keywords

Recombinant protein expression Bioinformatics HPLC/FPLC Computational modelling Protein Biochemistry Protein Purification

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Recent publications:
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Key publications

1. Bolanos-Garcia VM, Matak-Vinkovic D, Lischetti T, Cota E, Simpson PJ, Chirgadze DY, Spring DR, Robinson CV, Blundell TL, 2011, Structure of a Blinkin-BUBR1 complex reveals an interaction essential for kinetochore-mitotic checkpoint regulation underlying an unanticipated binding site. Structure 19(11): 1691-1700. 2, Blundell TL, Hendrickson WA. 2011. What is 'current opinion' in structural biology? Curr Opin Struct Biol. 21(4):447-9. 3. Bolanos-Garcia VM, Blundell TL, 2011, BUB1 and BUBR1: multifaceted kinases of the cell cycle. Trends Biochem Sci. 36(3):141-50. 4. Sibanda BL, Chirgadze DY, Blundell TL.2010. Crystal structure of DNA-PKcs reveals a large open-ring cradle comprised of HEAT repeats. Nature 463(7277):118-21. 5. Murray CW, Blundell TL. 2010. Structural biology in fragment-based drug design. Curr Opin Struct Biol. 20 (4):497-507.

Molecular surface representation of the crystal structure of DNA-PKcs.