2009 Applied Biosystems Edman Award: Danny Hatters

Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology University of Melbourne

Danny Hatters completed his Honours year in 1996 under the tutelage of Dr Ed Newbigin and Dr Bing Liu at the School of Botany, University of Melbourne. He studied sexual self-incompatibility in the plant Nicotiana glauca, purifying and partially sequencing two fertility-related RNases from the flowers. Danny then worked as a research assistant with Associate Professor Geoff Howlett in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne, where he expressed and purified recombinant human apolipoprotein (apo) C-II and investigated how apoC-II bound to synthetic lipid vesicles. During this work, he discovered that, in the absence of lipids, apoC-II formed amyloid fibrils with a striking twisted-ribbon morphology. This discovery laid the foundations for his PhD under the mentorship of Geoff Howlett and Professor Bill Sawyer. His studies on how parameters such as lipid binding, chaperones and macromolecular crowding influence the formation and structure of apoC-II fibres resulted in 14 publications and an invitation to speak at a Gordon Conference in 2002. During his PhD, Danny travelled to Oxford University for a three-month internship with Professors Chris Dobson and Carol Robinson, world leaders in protein folding and mass spectrometry. In 2000, Danny was awarded the Young Biophysicist Award by the Australian Society for Biophysics.

In 2002, Danny went to the Gladstone Institutes/University of California in San Francisco for a postdoctoral fellowship under the mentorship of Professor Karl Weisgraber. Using fluorescence and electron paramagnetic spectroscopies, Danny identified distinct conformational differences between three isoforms of apoE that are associated with profoundly different risks for Alzheimer’s disease. In 2005, Danny was awarded a John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation fellowship and was promoted to Research Scientist at the Gladstone. In 2006, he received two prestigious awards: a Young Investigator Award at the Annual Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function and the inaugural Boomerang Award from the ASBMB. His postdoctoral work led to seven publications, including an invited review for Trends in Biochemical Sciences.

In 2007, Danny obtained a CR Roper Fellowship, enabling his return to the University of Melbourne to start his own research laboratory in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. His current research program is focused on devising new approaches for examining protein dynamics in live cells with fluorescence-based technologies. A key area of study is how aggregation-prone proteins accrue in cells and influence the cellular machinery.

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This page last modified: April 25, 2009.