ANC Researcher awarded prestigious Royal Society/ Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellowship

Dr Edward Wallace awarded prestigious Royal Society/ Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellowship to study stress response in infectious fungi.

Edward has £1.4mi for 5 years from the scheme, moving to the School of Biological Sciences at Edinburgh.

Lay Research Summary:

How do fungi survive in a changing environment, when they cannot move away from danger or towards food? How do infectious fungi begin to grow in a human body? Fungi have a toolbox of RNA and protein: under stress they get out some tools and put others away. For example, when fungi are hot, they shut down heat-sensitive processes, and concentrate on making proteins that protect them against heat.

I will combine experimental and computational techniques to:

1. Explore how cells move RNAs inside cells when they are dangerously hot, by measuring movement of a large collection of synthetic RNAs. 

2. Investigate the function of a protein, called Ssd1, that is essential for fungi to survive stress. I will measure the exact locations on RNAs that contact Ssd1, and how that affects cell survival.

3. Find out what the first changes to RNA and protein are as Cryptococcus neoformans infection begins in an approximate model of a lung.

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Sir Henry Dale Fellowships