phone: +44 (0)20 7631 6822
fax: +44 (0)20 7631 6803
Email: t.barrett@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk
Our major interests include the NF-κB transcriptional pathways that are central to diverse cellular processes such as
developmental switching, cell death and immunity. Owing to their importance, aberrant activation of these normally
tightly regulated mechanisms has been linked to several
pathologies including a range of human cancers and inflammation. Both pathways can be
inappropriately stimulated when their normal "control" mechanisms breakdown as a direct result of mutations within key regulatory
proteins. This has also been shown to occur in response to infection by certain viruses such as the Kaposi's
Sarcoma Herpes virus,
the main causal agent of AIDS related cancer, and the Human T-cell leukaemia virus HTLV-1 (responsible for an aggressive form
of T-cell leukaemia in adults). Both viruses produce host mimetic proteins that use a number of elegant strategies to
"hijack" the NF-κB pathways that as a result are permanently "switched on" or constitutively activated.
We therefore seek to understand the molecular basis underlying viral oncoprotein
mediated constitutive activation by determining the crystal structures of key protein-protein complexes.
We also have interests in the area of DNA repair with ongoing projects in prokaryotic excision repair
mechanisms, eukaryotic homologous recombination and replication.
Positions held
1995-1998 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NIMR (Mill Hill) and UCL
1998-2003 BBSRC David Phillips Career Development Research Fellow
2003- Lecturer in Structural Biology
