Department of Biochemistry

The Department of Biochemistry is a member of the School of Biological Sciences and is one of the largest departments in Cambridge - around 400 research and support staff - with an internationally competitive research programme. The Department’s research contributes to the themes that describe the research in the School. We have attracted many outstanding independent research fellows with funding from the Wellcome Trust, British Heart Foundation, BBSRC and MRC, and several of our senior staff have been seconded to prestigious fellowships. The Department houses facilities funded by Wellcome Trust, BBSRC and MRC for modern biomolecular research, including an 800MHz NMR facility, modern X-ray laboratories, core facilities for mass spectrometry and plasmon resonance, advanced services for protein and nucleic acid sequencing. We have collaborated with the Department of Genetics in establishing the Systems Biology Centre, adjacent to the Sanger Building, which houses array technologies, proteomics and informatics, and we have established metabolomics elsewhere in the Department. We also participate in the new Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research. These new developments underpin research in a range of different biological processes from molecular enzymology, through cell signalling and control of gene expression, to molecular microbiology, plant molecular biology and biofuel research, cancer and cardiovascular biology.