New grant to help unravel the mysteries of DNA
Professor Tom Brown and his colleagues Professor Keith Fox, Dr Ali Tavassoli, Dr Eugen Stulz and Dr Afaf El-Sagheer have secured a £4m grant, shared with the University of Oxford, to continue their pioneering work on DNA for the next five years.
The grant has been awarded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Strategic Longer and Larger Grants fund (sLoLaS).
Researchers from both universities will be exploiting a new technology (click ligation) to join synthetic nucleic acid fragments by chemical methods. This versatile technique can generate long pieces of DNA or RNA with specific modifications, for use by scientists in the biological sciences and chemistry.
The results of this research will be invaluable to individuals working in fundamental and applied research in the fields of chemical biology, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, and genomics.