We are happy to share our news about the most recent C-Trap® and m-Trap® installations in the UK!
We’ll start with the recently installed C-Trap system at the MRC-London Institute of Medical Sciences, Imperial College London that is used by the cell biologists and biochemists at the group of Prof. Luis Aragon, as well as the biophysicists in Prof. David Rueda’s lab. Their teams have already released meaningful publications in Molecular Cell using one of our most advanced systems, equipped with quadruple optical traps for inducing complex DNA-DNA interactions, and STED to measure and visualize DNA-binding proteins with the highest resolution. This C-Trap will be a vital tool in the ICL group’s plan to study SMC protein complexes, such as cohesin and condesin, as well as other protein-nucleic acid complexes. Both groups are actually already long-time users of the first C-Trap at ICL and have used it to study Cas9 properties including genomic binding specificity, off-target dwell times, cleavage kinetics, and molecule-dependent activity for cohesin in tethering DNA molecules.
We also installed another instrument in London, this time an m-Trap, which will be the primary tool of investigation at the newly found lab of Dr. Graeme King at UCL. His group plans to use the optical tweezers system to conduct research in DNA mechanics and DNA supercoiling. Despite the hurdles involved in remote training, Dr. King’s group is already well underway in their research!
Lastly, Prof. Luca Pellegrini and his group at the University of Cambridge will use their new C-Trap to study DNA repair and DNA replication using human proteins. By adding a whole new experimental dimension to their structural biology research, they’ll be able to complement their findings by gaining direct proof of the molecular mechanisms under investigation using the C-Trap. Prof. Pellegrini stated the following:
We are extremely pleased to have received the generous support of the BBSRC (grant ref.MR/S021248/1) that enabled us to provide the University of Cambridge with a state-of-the-art single-molecule instrument that was not previously available to the Cambridge community of researchers. We are looking forward to the many novel insights that the C-Trap will provide.
We wish all of the UK teams good luck with their ongoing research, and we are eagerly awaiting their upcoming results!
