Iain Cheeseman

We're really fascinated by the machines that our cells build in order to drive forward various processes: cells' ability to grow, divide, proliferate, and move things around. There's a bunch of machinery that every cell needs to make, in order to achieve those functions. 

We're especially interested in "alternative flavors" of proteins being made. It turns out that cells can actually decode their genome in very different ways. A single mRNA provides information for the cell to make proteins; that same message can be interpreted by the cell very differently from one moment to the next, producing proteins that are longer or shorter than expected. Even though these variants have long evaded our discovery, they're central to the ways our cells work. 

We're focused on what those variants do and how they work inside of the cell. We also want to know how a cell can control what is being made and when. Cancer cells can even co-opt certain processes to make alternate proteins, and we want to understand how they do this, in order for us to be able to target some of these alternative modes of protein production.