Dr Megan Wright

Profile

I obtained my PhD with Prof. Edward Tate at Imperial College London, working on the development of chemical tools to study protein lipidation in protozoan parasites. An EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship enabled me to stay in Imperial for another year. I was then was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to carry out postdoctoral work at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, hosted by Prof. Stephan Sieber. In 2016 I joined the University of Leeds as a University Academic Fellow, a tenure-track position equivalent to Lecturer, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2022. My group works on chemical tools to study biological mechanism.

Responsibilities

• Deputy Programme Manager for Joint honours and Natural Sciences

Research interests

Our research uses the creativity of chemistry to understand basic biology and tackle important questions in health and disease. We work in the area of chemical proteomics, developing chemical tools to detect and manipulate small molecule-protein interactions. These interactions range from the modification of a protein with a small molecule, to the binding of a drug to an enzyme, or the interaction of a signal with its receptor. This research is highly interdisciplinary and spans organic and peptide synthesis, protein biochemistry, cell biology and quantitative mass spectrometry-based proteomics.

We are interested in exploring interactions between molecules directly in living systems. For example, we are studying the interplay between bacterial pathogens and the host: cells communicate and manipulate each other using small molecule signals, yet in many cases we do not know how signals are sensed or we lack the tools to understand the mechanism of sensing. One area of our research is in ‘weaponising’ compounds with photo- or chemically-reactive functionalities to stabilise their interactions with protein targets. Because we are interested in applying tools in live cells, we develop probes equipped with small, minimally disruptive tags. These tags then act as handles for selective labelling of probe-protein complexes for analysis.

Current projects in the group (see our website for more information) include:

• Developing new chemical tools to understand how human and bacterial cells communicate
• Understanding protein-protein interactions using chemical tools and mass spectrometry approaches
• Discovering new anti-infectives and unravelling their mode of action
• Designing chemical tools to map redox changes to proteins in cells

• Structures and Probes of Intrinsically Disordered Regions (SPIDR)

Qualifications

• PhD in Chemical Biology, Imperial College London (2013)
• MRes in Chemical Biology, Imperial College London (2009)
• MSci, BA Hons. in Natural Sciences (Chemistry), University of Cambridge (2008)

Professional memberships

• Member Royal Society of Chemistry (MRSC)
• Member Royal Society of Biology (MRSB)
• The Biochemical Society
• The Microbiology Society

Student education

I teach on Biological chemistry, chemical biology and organic chemistry on the undergraduate degree programmes. I offer projects for MNatSci and MChem final year projects.

I teach Proteomics and Chemical Proteomics to taught postgraduates. I am a research project supervisor for the MSc in Chemistry and the MSc in Drug Discovery and Development

Research groups and institutes

• Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry

Current postgraduate researchers

• Qi You