Healthy cells sense diverse external environmental signals and communicate these internally to control processes such as cellular growth and movement. Such messages are important for immune cell function, but can also become dysregulated in cancer/metastasis. PEAK family pseudokinases are a family of signalling proteins, overexpressed in several aggressive cancers, that are critical messengers in such pathways (e.g. Roy et al, Nat Commun 2023, 14 (1), 3542)). Our research aims to visualise and understand how PEAK proteins function and identify targets for development of new cancer therapeutics.
This project will involve the expression and purification of recombinant proteins involved in PEAK signalling and a combination of structural (eg. X-ray crystallography or Cryo-electron microscopy), biophysical (e.g. Surface Plasmon Resonance) and cellular imaging techniques (e.g. fluorescence microscopy).
