Beschreibung:
Brian Henderson is Professor of Biochemistry at University College London. He started his research career as a cell biologist, migrating to become an immunologist then pharmacologist with six years experience in the pharmaceutical industry. In the early 1990s studies of bacteria-host interactions identified a bacterial molecular chaperone, chaperonin 60, as a potent signalling molecule able to induce osteoclast formation and bone remodelling. This was Henderson's introduction to protein moonlighting and he has spent the past twenty years exploring the roles of bacterial and human moonlighting proteins in human health and disease.
The past 25 years has seen the emergence of a wealth of data suggesting that novel biological functions of known proteins play important roles in biology and medicine. This ability of proteins to exhibit more than one unique biological activity is known as protein moonlighting. Moonlighting proteins can exhibit novel biological functions, thus extending the function of the proteome, and are also implicated in the pathology of a growing number of idiopathic and infectious diseases.