2006 ASBMB Fellowship: Andrew Perry

Andrew Perry Andrew completed a BSc at the University of Melbourne in 1999, co-majoring in organic chemistry and biochemistry. Before starting his Honours year he undertook an Australian National University Summer Scholar project under the supervision of Andrew Torda, studying graph-based methods for protein structural alignment. His continued interest in protein structure led him to take up an Honours project with Associate Professor Paul Gooley at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne, where he studied the active site metal binding of an asymmetric dinucleoside tetraphosphatase using NMR spectroscopy. Subsequently, Andrew began a PhD project under the supervision of Paul Gooley, in collaboration with Associate Professor Trevor Lithgow. The focus of this project was three-dimensional structure determination of mitochondrial outer membrane protein import receptors, components of the TOM complex, with an aim to further understand the function and evolution of the mitochondrial protein import machinery. This work resulted in determination of the NMR solution structure of the first representative of a plant Tom20 targeting signal receptor, which appears to have evolved independently of its animal and fungal analogue, but has converged on a similar function. This work was awarded an ASBMB Student Poster Prize at ComBio2004 in Perth and was later published in Current Biology in February 2006. Currently, Andrew continues to study mitochondrial protein import in the laboratory of Trevor Lithgow, this time focusing on the SAM (Sorting and Assembly Machinery) complex which functions to help insert and assemble outer mitochondrial integral membrane proteins. A particular focus is structural characterisation of the Sam50 integral membrane beta-barrel protein, with an aim to understand how it functions using both X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy. This ASBMB Fellowship will allow Andrew to travel to the laboratory of Susan Buchanan, National Institutes of Health, USA, where he will learn new techniques in membrane protein crystallography.

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This page last modified: October 10, 2008.