An interview with Fleming Prize winner Professor Frank Sargent

摘要

I was awarded the Fleming Prize a long time ago and back then I was working on quite different things than I am today. I started my own research group in 2000 after I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. I had been working on the Tat export pathway as a postdoc and, as it was a brand new discovery, there was absolutely loads more to discover about it. I had this hypothesis that some bacterial twin-arginine signal peptides must have soluble binding-proteins that assist their function, so we had set about looking for some, finding some and figuring out how they worked. Because the research headed down an avenue of protein–protein interactions, we ended up doing loads of biophysical experiments – including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC). I really liked that level of protein biochemistry (no gene regulation in sight) and making new discoveries about the natural world is the best feeling in science. A couple of years after the Fleming Prize, external funding appeared to be drying up for that type of biochemistry, so it was a case of adapt or become an admissions tutor or something like that.