Improving baculovirus expression. Funded by the BBSRC this work focused on  development of high throughput expression systems. The aim was to reduce the bottleneck in protein production currently preventing high throughout structure determination. Our approach, an expression suite of vectors allows expression in a variety of contexts and partly understands what underpins the observed high and low expression levels of certain proteins. Graduate students still involved are Stuart Pengelley and Fredelina Yong.

SPINE - Structural Proteomics in Europe. A European consortium lead by Oxford where we provided input on high throughput baculovirus expression technology. SPINE has a large website where you can find out about the technologies used, the targets identified and the progress to date on crystal structures.

Virus display and the isolation of novel molecules. Funded by the BBSRC as part of its ExGen programme this project used advanced baculovirus engineering for the display of cDNA libraries on the surface of virus particles. We invented baculovirus display in 1995 (Boublik etal) at the same time as Wolfgang Ernst and Reingard Grabherr at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna. Since then Chris Oker-Blom's group at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland has also worked on display. A complex library and develop panning procedures for the isolation of novel ligand binding proteins were developed in a collaboration with the University of Warwick Dept of Chemistry and Warwick HRI.