Contact information
Claire Morris
stuart-pa@strubi.ox.ac.uk
Professor David Stuart Research Group
Henry Wellcome Building of Genomic Medicine
David Stuart
FRS
Professor of Structural Biology
Viruses are attractive targets for study at the molecular level, since they are sufficiently simple that we may hope to achieve a rather complete understanding of their biology. In practice although their genomes are compact they display astonishing diversity, both in structure and function. Our attempts to relate structure to function have benefited from the developments in X-ray crystallographic methods that have brought very complex structures within reach of description in atomic detail. Our targets range from picornaviruses, small ssRNA viruses, which include a number of important animal and human pathogens, to the larger dsRNA viruses. At both ends of this spectrum (from less than 10,000,000 to about 100,000,000 Daltons) we now have representative atomic structures.
Our efforts are particularly focused on virus-receptor interactions and basic puzzles of virus assembly. Our studies here are highly collaborative, with strong links with a number of virologists (P. Mertens and B. Charleston (Pirbright), D. Rowlands (Leeds), P. Roy (London) as well as numerous groups elsewhere in Europe).
Work on cell-surface molecules is largely performed in collaboration with the group of Prof. E.Y. Jones, whose entry describes many of the projects.
We have a particular interest in studying virus evolution and many of these studies are perfoirmed in collaboration with D. Bamford in Helsinki.
Finally, we are studying a number of viral proteins and enzymes which are potential drug targets and/or illuminate how viruses modulate host responses. For example, the immune modulators of pox viruses.
Recent publications
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Antibody responses and correlates of protection in the general population after two doses of the ChAdOx1 or BNT162b2 vaccines
Journal article
Wei J. et al, (2022), Nature Medicine
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Purification of African Swine Fever Virus.
Journal article
Shimmon GL. et al, (2022), Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.), 2503, 179 - 186
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The antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 Beta underscores the antigenic distance to other variants.
Journal article
Liu C. et al, (2021), Cell Host Microbe
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iNEXT-Discovery and Instruct-ERIC: Integrating High-End Services for Translational Research in Structural Biology.
Journal article
Wienk H. et al, (2021), Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE
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The Duration, Dynamics, and Determinants of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Antibody Responses in Individual Healthcare Workers
Journal article
Lumley SF. et al, (2021), Clinical Infectious Diseases, 73, e699 - e709