Christopher J. Robinson

TL;DR: Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a secreted mitogen highly specific for cultured endothelial cells and plays a central role in both angiogenesis and vasculogenesis, most notably the neovascularisation of growing tumours.

TL;DR: Binding studies and molecular modeling demonstrated that an oligosaccharide 6 or 7 residues long was sufficient to fully occupy the heparin-binding site of a VEGF165 monomer, consistent with a model whereby the two heparIn-binding sites of the V EGF165 dimer interact simultaneously with highly sulfated S-domain regions of the HS chain that can be linked through a stretch of transition sequence.

TL;DR: An automated pipeline for the discovery and optimization of biosynthetic pathways for microbial production of fine chemicals is presented and application of the pipeline to optimize an alkaloids pathway demonstrates how it could facilitate the rapid optimization of microbial strains for production of any chemical compound of interest.

TL;DR: Heparin-like saccharides play an essential role in binding to both fibroblast growth factors (FGF) and their receptors at the cell surface and their ability to support FGF2 mitogenesis of heparan sulfate-deficient cells expressing FGFR1c is investigated.

TL;DR: The implementation of machine learning algorithms to model the RBS sequence-phenotype relationship from representative subsets of large combinatorial RBS libraries allowing the accurate prediction of optimal high-producers is presented.