Dr Darerca Owen
Position: Assistant Director of Research
Personal home page:
http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/~hrm28/
PubMed journal articles - click here
Dr Darerca Owen is pleased to consider applications from prospective PhD students.
Our work focuses on the relationship between structure and function in small G proteins and their effectors and regulators. These proteins control many signal transmission pathways that can become deregulated in cancer and other diseases. We focus or efforts on the Rho family small G proteins and the Ral GTPases, which are members of the Ras family. We employ a multidisciplinary approach utilizing structural biology (primarily NMR), biophysics, biochemistry and cell biology to generate data on the interactions the small G proteins undergo. These data can then be employed to drive rational drug design targeted at these protein-protein complexes.
NMR
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Owen, D., Campbell, L.J., Littlefield, K., Evetts, K.A., Li, Z., Sacks, D.B., Lowe, P.N. and Mott, H.R. (2008) The IQGAP1-Rac1 and IQGAP1-Cdc42 Interactions: Interfaces differ between the complexes J. Biol. Chem. 283: 1692 ? 1704 Fenwick, R.B., Prasannan, S., Campbell, L.J., Nietlispach,D., Evetts, K.A., Camonis, J., Mott, H.R. and Owen, D. (2009) Solution structure and dynamics of the small GTPase RalB in its active conformation: significance for effector protein binding Biochemistry 48: 2192?2206 Fenwick, R.B., Campbell, L.J., Rajasekar, K., Prasannan, S., Nietlispach, D., Camonis, J., Owen, D. and Mott, H.R. (2010) The RalB-RLIP76/RalBP1 complex reveals a novel mode of Ral-effector interaction. Structure (in press)