Dr. Julian Huppert
RCUK Academic Fellow in Computational Biology
Fellow of Clare College
Group: Biological and Soft Systems
Address:
Room 239 Bragg Building,
Cavendish Laboratory,
JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge CB3 0HE.
Tel: +44 (0)1223 337256
Email: jlh29 "at" cam.ac.uk
Group Secretary / Administrator / Personal Assistant:
Tracy Inman
Tel: +44 (0)1223 337007
Fax: +44 (0)1223 337000
Email: admin "at" bss.cam.ac.uk
Biography:
Julian originally trained as an organic chemist, working on asymmetric catalysis. He earned his PhD in biological chemistry, working with Prof Shankar Balasubramanian on G-quadruplex nucleic acids, performing biophysical experiments and computational analyses. For this study he was awarded a Research Fellowship from Trinity College, Cambridge, which he used to work with Dr Manolis Dermitzakis at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, working on population genomics, and was part of the ENCODE project consortium. He then moved to the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, and since 2007 at the Cavendish Laboratory. Outside pure research, Julian has founded an award-winning biotechnology company and been heavily involved in UK politics.
Research Interests:
Nucleic acids are capable of forming a wide variety of different structures, far removed from the Watson-Crick double helix, itself a Cavendish discovery. Many of the alternative structures that can be formed have physiological functions, such as controlling gene expression via gene transcription or translation. Our goal is to use biophysical methods to identify these structures, and enable prediction of their structure and stability, and then to combine this work with bioinformatic analyses in order to identify and understand their functions. Ultimately this work may lead to novel insights into natural regulatory processes, as well as new targets for pharmaceutical development. We are also exploring the potential to use these unusual structures for nanotechnological applications.
Research Group - Biological and Soft Systems
Selected Publications:
Please follow the link to the publication list.