{"id":3947,"date":"2016-05-19T20:29:46","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T19:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/?p=3947"},"modified":"2016-05-20T08:55:09","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T07:55:09","slug":"determination-is-key-baddiley-lecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/determination-is-key-baddiley-lecture\/","title":{"rendered":"Determination is key – Prof Ramakrishnan’s Baddiley Lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kevin Waldron<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Last week saw ICaMB host the latest in our series of Baddiley lectures, which commemorates Professor Sir James Baddiley <\/a>(1918-2008). Baddiley was a distinguished Professor at Newcastle University (1954-81) and a Fellow of the Royal Society<\/a> (elected 1961<\/a>) who made numerous important fundamental discoveries<\/a> in microbiology, not least the discovery of teichoic acids, cell wall components in Gram positive bacteria.<\/p>\n

\"Jeff<\/a>

Jeff Errington introduces Venki Ramakrishnan to the ICaMB audience<\/p><\/div>\n

Baddiley\u2019s work on the fundamental\u00a0processes of bacteria, including the structure and function of components of the bacterial cell wall, is continued to this day in Newcastle through the work of members of ICaMB\u2019s Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology (CBCB)<\/a>. Although James Baddiley died<\/a> shortly after the first in ICaMB\u2019s series of Baddiley lectures, we were delighted that the Baddiley family was again represented at this year\u2019s lecture by James\u2019s son, Christopher Baddiley.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s guest speaker was Professor Sir Venki Ramakrishnan<\/a>, distinguished research leader and Deputy Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology<\/a> in Cambridge, Nobel laureate<\/a> and newly-elected President of the Royal Society<\/a>. With\u00a0all of the demands on his time that come with this new role\u00a0as President, the large audience that gathered on Friday afternoon\u00a0were grateful\u00a0that Venki was able to find time to visit Newcastle to deliver his lecture. As ever, both the lecture and the surrounding celebration was expertly organised and introduced by CBCB Director, Professor Jeff Errington<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Venki<\/a>

Venki illustrates the structure of the yeast mitochondrial ribosome<\/p><\/div>\n

Venki\u2019s lecture gave a brief history of his atomic-resolution structural studies of the ribosome<\/a>, the macromolecular nucleoprotein complex that converts the four-letter genetic code in nucleic acid into the twenty-letter amino acid code in proteins<\/a>. He presented detailed\u00a0structural models of eukaryotic ribosomes, derived from\u00a0X-ray crystallography<\/a> and cryo-electron microscopy<\/a>\u00a0data\u00a0accumulated over 30 years of detailed study in his laboratory.<\/p>\n

We asked some of ICaMB\u2019s early career researchers to describe their impression of Venki\u2019s lecture:<\/p>\n

\u201cProfessor Venki Ramakrishnan was kind enough to deliver this year\u2019s Baddiley lecture. It was an honour to meet Venki, who somehow managed to fit us in between Royal Society committee meetings and a chat with the Science minister! He impressed us all with a phenomenal talk discussing how he solved the structure of the mitochondrial ribosome using cryo electron microscopy. Wow \u2013 cryo EM has truly moved beyond blob-ology! One thing that really struck me about Venki is how humble he is; despite being so incredibly successful and lauded, there\u2019s not a trace of ego on the guy; something for us all to aspire to.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Venki<\/a>

Venki illustrates how the ribosome works<\/p><\/div>\n

Seamus Holden<\/a>, University Research Fellow<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was incredibly cool to hear about Venki\u2019s work first hand. The enormity of his achievement became clear when he showed a single slide with the dozens of conformations of the ribosome\u2019s catalytic cycle and indicated that there were structures available for the majority of them! And what was humbling was that Venki did not seem at all interested in dwelling upon his past successes. Rather, he briskly moved past this slide onto his current work regarding mitochondrial ribosomes which was both cutting-edge but also somewhat raw because of its novelty. I found it inspiring to see a scientist of his stature still so driven to continue discovering and learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Post<\/a>

Post lecture, Venki holds the gift he received from his hosts at ICaMB<\/p><\/div>\n

Heath Murray<\/a>, Royal Society URF<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cFor me Venki\u2019s journey was an excellent advert for never giving up. Often as researchers (particularly at the start of our careers) we are encouraged to know when to call time on a set of experiments that are bogged down and not yielding answers. Pursuit of the next grant and the speed of some of our competitors unfortunately make it risky to continue to spend years and years believing in the same project that fails to show progress relatively quickly. Yet what an example Venki is, many years and many postdocs focusing on the same problem, persistence and belief in himself and his team has more than paid off. Inspirational.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suzanne Madgwick<\/a>, Wellcome Trust Career Re-entry Fellow<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kevin Waldron. Last week saw ICaMB host the latest in our series of Baddiley lectures, which commemorates Professor Sir James Baddiley (1918-2008). Baddiley was a distinguished Professor at Newcastle University (1954-81) and a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5389,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[151,45,44,53],"class_list":["post-3947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","tag-ribosomes","tag-royal-society","tag-structural-biology","tag-visitors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3947"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3975,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3947\/revisions\/3975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/icamblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}