Native mass spectrometry for the discovery of new anticancer agents

A 4-year fully funded BBSRC PhD CASE studentship is available at the University of Nottingham in collaboration with Erebagen Ltd to screen engineered bacterial natural product libraries for anti-cancer activity using native mass spectrometry.

This exciting project is supervised by Prof Neil Oldham and Dr Luisa Ciano, from the School of Chemistry, and Dr Doug Roberts and Prof Greg Challis from Erebagen.

It will provide training in biosynthetic engineering using state-of-the-art facilities as well as development of a mass spectrometry-based assay for detection of binding to the target protein, the human elongation factor eEF1A.

This will be followed by structural characterisation of hit compounds, initially by coupled tandem mass spectrometry, and then complementary spectroscopic techniques.