Dr Chris Toseland, from the School of Biosciences, has been awarded almost £1.5m by the Medical Research Council for a Career Development Award.
The prestigious five-year award will fund Dr Toseland’s ongoing research into the regulation of gene expression, which could shed light on how diseases develop.
Chris Toseland joined the University in spring 2015 as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. He is part of the newly established Mechanics and Dynamics of Cells and Proteins (MaDCaP) group.
Chris Toseland gained his PhD in 2009 from the MRC National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) where he investigated DNA-based molecular motors. He then moved to the Ludwig Maximillian University Munich with an EMBO Long Term Fellowship to study the regulation of myosin in cytoskeletal transport. He remained in Munich, moving to the Max-Planck Institute of Biochemistry where he focused on chromosomal organisation and dynamics.
Over the past decade, it has become established that cytoskeletal myosin motors are present in the nucleus acting as transcription regulators. Chris Toseland’s lab specialises in applying state-of-the-art fluorescence techniques to probe and directly visualise how these motors work. This will shed light on how diseases develop which allows for a more targeted medical intervention.
For further information, see Chris Toseland’s staff profile: http://www.kent.ac.uk/bio/profiles/staff/toseland.html