New Investigator joins the Centre

We are delighted to welcome Dr Despoina Mavridou to the Centre, who was recently awarded an MRC Career Development Award.

Despoina is a Chemist by degree, having competed her studies in Greece in 2003. She then joined the Department of Biochemistry in Oxford, where under the supervision of Prof. Stuart Ferguson and Prof. Christina Redfield, she was introduced to the world of proteins. Her project focused on the formation of disulfide bonds in Escherichia coli. After the completion of her PhD in 2008, she remained in the Biochemistry Department as a postdoctoral research associate where she continued to explore disulfide bond formation but also branched out to study cytochrome c maturation. During her years in Oxford, she used a variety of techniques to study multiple protein partners and her fascination with bacteria and their ability to adapt and thrive in every environment remained.

In October 2014 Despoina was awarded an MRC Career Development Award to start her own group at Imperial College. The proposed project will take her back to the first protein system she worked on, the DSB system which forms disulfide bonds in all Gram-negative bacteria. The DSB proteins are responsible for the formation and quality control of disulfide bridges in hundreds of protein substrates. Most factors that allow bacteria to be efficient pathogens are also dependent on the function of this system. Even more importantly, the DSB systems found in pathogens seem to have diversified compared to the systems found in non-pathogenic bacteria. Numerous bacterial pathogens encode multiple copies of the key DSB protein players. This implies a specialisation, an adaptation of the system to efficiently handle substrates related to pathogenesis and this aspect of the DSB system remains hugely understudied.

Despoina will commence her fellowship in November 2015 after working for a year in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, where she studied the regulation of expression and release of bacteriocins in bacterial populations in the groups of Prof. Kevin Foster and Prof. Stuart West.