Chris Tate

MRC, University of Cambridge, UK

Chris has worked throughout his career on integral membrane proteins, including red blood cell antigens, transporters and GPCRs, and he is now a Programme Leader at the LMB in Cambridge. His group has determined many different GPCR structures by both X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM to study ligand specificity, efficacy and coupling to G proteins and -arrestin. Most recently his lab published the first structure of a fungal receptor, an obligate dimer that couples to two G proteins simultaneously, and showed its unique activation mechanism compared to other GPCR classes. His group has also developed new tools and methods to facilitate the structure determination of GPCRs, such as mini-G proteins and conformational thermostabilisation. In 2007, Chris was a co-founder of the GPCR drug discovery company Heptares Therapeutics (now Sosei Heptares), based on his work on conformational thermostabilisation. He was elected a member of EMBO in 2020 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021.

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