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Professor John Atkins receives Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate Research 4-year grant
Professor John Atkins, School of Biochemistry and Cell Biology was one of the twelve recipients of an Irish Research Council Advanced Laureate Research 4-year grant.
One third of the six Advanced Laureate grants for science have been awarded to UCC and one of these is to John F. Atkins. The grant for €1 million was awarded in April 2019 and will fund a project entitled "Codes within THE CODE: Hidden Genetic Information". This award is the due to a team effort that has been critically dependent on collaborators. Notably Dr Gary Loughran and our UCC collaborator Professor Pavel (Pasha) Baranov have been crucial to its success.
What is really worth celebrating is the fascinating versatility in decoding the information embedded in the hereditary material, the major role of successive generations of researchers in UCC (Departments of Biochemistry and Microbiology) and in TCD (Department of Genetics), together with collaborators elsewhere notably including the Departments of Human Genetics in Utah and Structural Biology in Stanford.
This work has revealed fundamental insights into the evolution of the programming of life on earth. The new much appreciated award will provide exciting opportunities to gain atomic level understanding of the phenomenon that has been discovered, and has potential for the design of compounds relevant to its manipulation.
Read more in the Irish Research Council news item.