2001 ASBMB Fellowship: Julie Dutton

Dutton Julie Dutton completed her Bachelor of Science (Biotechnology) degree with Honours at the University of New South Wales in 1997. Her Honours project concerned the molecular biology of novel galanin receptor subtypes and was carried out under the supervision of Dr Tiinaa Iismaa and Professor John Shine at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. Rather than immediately enrolling in a Ph.D. programme Julie spent a year as a research assistant in the laboratory of Professor Max Bennett in the Department of Physiology and Institute of Biomedical Research at the University of Sydney. There she worked in the field of purinergic receptor biology, constructing a series of adenoviral vectors encoding a functional chimera of the purinergic receptor P2X1 and green fluorescent protein. She also participated in immunohistochemistry studies aimed at characterising the distribution of P2X receptor subtypes.

In 1999 Julie made two large leaps: one from molecular biology to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, the other from Sydney to Brisbane enrolling in a PhD at the University of Queensland. There she is studying under the supervision of Professor David Craik in the Institute for Molecular Bioscience. The main focus of her work is a family of potent peptide antagonists of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, the α-conotoxins. These toxic peptides are very small, just 12 to 18 amino acid residues in length yet they exhibit remarkable structural definition, a property largely conferred by their two disulfide bonds. Julie has used them as model peptides in which to study the effects of disulfide bonding on protein structure and function. In addition she has used a-conotoxins as a model system in which to evaluate whether backbone cyclisation of peptides is a viable way of increasing peptide stability thereby improving the potential of peptides as therapeutics. The ASBMB fellowship will help support Julie's attendance at the 15th Symposium of the Protein Society in Philadelphia in late July of 2001.

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This page last modified: October 10, 2008.