I’m Claire, a PhD student on the Bristol branch of the Synthetic Biology CDT. As well as my science, I am passionate about music, art, science outreach and mountaineering! I completed my Mountain Leader training in 2016, and am currently one of the postgraduate officers of the University of Bristol Expeditions Society. On this blog you can expect to find mainly my photos, although also a smattering of my thoughts on many things, whether science, arts or mountaineering related.

Also love me some books – hit me up if you have any recommendations, I’m always looking for more stuff to read!

I volunteer at Caring in Bristol, a fantastic Bristol based charity providing much needed support to homeless people in the local area. Please do get in touch with me that sounds like something you’d want to get involved with, as I’m aware that knowing where to start can be a bit daunting!

What do I want to do in my PhD?

My research is in the field of de novo enzyme design, aiming to produce new proteins with oxidoreductase activity. What this means, it that I am trying to create proteins that have never been seen before in nature. The hope is that through understanding these proteins, we’ll be able to unlock powerful new, industrially relevant chemistry, hopefully paving the way for a new generation of clean, green catalysts.I am primarily based in the Anderson group, which utilises a ‘maquette’ approach to enzyme design. These proteins are made up of bundles of simple helices, that contain redox active cofactors such as heme. By changing these cofactors, and designing the protein environment around them, we hope to be able to alter and control the chemistry these chemical groups can carry out. The end result tends to look something like this:

How am I doing this?

I am aiming to use computational biochemistry tools such as classic Molecular Dynamics and Rosetta to design these new proteins, which can then be expressed and biochemically characterised in the lab. The computational portion of my project is supervised by Adrian Mulholland. I hope to use QM/MM calculations to further computationally characterise the enzymatic reactivity of these de novo proteins. My current focus is on engineering catalytic activity into b-type heme containing maquettes, that have previously been developed and structurally characterised by the Anderson group. I hope to be able to unlock powerful cytochrome P450-like chemistry in these maquettes, by integrating both computational and experimental design methods.