Our ESR Chun Yin (Jamie) Chan from the Carell group at LMU had the opportunity to go on secondment at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, from July to October 2022.
The MRC LMB is one of the world’s leading research institutes in molecular biology. Jamie joined the group led by Dr. Philipp Holliger, which focuses on chemical biology, synthetic biology and in vitro evolution. The Holliger lab investigates fundamental questions of the chemical logic and constraints of molecular information encoding and the encoded synthesis; replication and evolution of novel sequence-defined biopolymers for applications in biotechnology and medicine; and the emergence of genetic function in chemical systems.
During his stay, Jamie explored the capacity of a recently discovered RNA polymerase ribozyme utilising trinucleotide triphosphates (triplets) as substrates to incorporate chemically modified triplets, for example, for the template-directed and sequence-specific positioning of chemical groups in nucleic acid polymers, and investigated how could these modifications possibly impact the ribozyme’s polymerisation in terms of fidelity, activity and chemical space for evolution in a prebiotic scenario.