NERC postdoctoral fellow - Mike completed a NERC-funded PhD entitled ‘Species identification in ancient and degraded bone fragments using protein mass spectrometry’ in the Department of Biology, University of York which initially focussed on sequencing the small non-collagenous bone protein osteocalcin by LC-ESI-qTOF-MS and LC-MALDI-TOF-TOF-MS. He progressed on to the study of bone collagen (I), because of its greater persistence in fossilised remains, and developed ZooMS (‘Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry’), in which collagen peptides are fractionated by SPE and fingerprinted using MALDI-TOF-MS. Typical archaeological applications are to distinguish between morphologically-similar taxa such as the caprine species, sheep and goats, or the identification of taxa in limited but highly assemblages dating back ~1.5 Ma. During his postdoctoral research he refined this methodology to work on other collagen-based samples, ranging from mummified skin and leathers, meat and bone meal and gelatine-containing food products, as well as other mineralised tissues such as ostrich eggshell (refined for fingerprinting of struthiocalcin). His current fellowship “Assessment of biodiversity in pleistocene Britain through comprehensive small-scale microsampling of vertebrate fossil remains” is based on using ZooMS to study the biodiversity of Pleistocene Britain through the identification of tens of thousands of spatially-mapped fragmentary faunal remains dating back hundreds of thousands of years.

BBSRC/RSE Enterprise fellowship to exploit the commercial potential of work developed during his post-doc within the Micklefield lab. The lab has recently introduced an entirely novel approach for controlling gene expression in cells with small synthetic molecules [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2010, 107, 2830]. The ability to selectively regulate gene expression can be used to study fundamental biological pathways and processes in vivo. Additionally this has huge commercial potential with applications in drug discovery, protein production for biopharmaceuticals, biocatalysts, and within the emerging field of synthetic biology. This fellowship based in the MIB will support the development of this technology, allow further consultation with identified industrial partners, and support the commercial developments. Home page

For the past 15 years Christopher Blanford's research has focused on the areas where multiple traditional scientific disciplines overlap, starting with his doctoral work on ordered porous materials at the University of Minnesota, with Andreas Stein and Barry Carter. Since moving to England, he has researched porous three-dimensional photonic crystals (with Bob Denning) then enzyme electrochemistry on chemically tailored electrode surfaces (with Fraser Armstrong) at the University of Oxford. He was awarded a Career Acceleration Fellowship from the EPSRC in 2008 to continue his work at the interface between chemistry, materials science and biochemistry. He also serves as an editor for the Journal of Materials Science. He and his group join the MIB and School of Materials in January 2011.