Gemma Atkinson, Associate Professor in Molecular Evolution, is one of the speakers at the 3rd National Meeting of the Swedish Chemical Society, SCS2025, in June 16-18 2025.
Can you briefly summarize the topic of your research?
─ In my group we try to discover new molecular mechanisms and interactions through exploring microbial genomes with computational methods. We are particularly interested in proteins involved in microbial attack and defence, such as toxin-antitoxin systems and other components of bacterial immune systems.
Is there anything that you are extra proud of from your work?
─ I’m really proud of our multidisciplinary team. Working together, we can combine bioinformatics, to make predictions about molecular function, with experimental analyses to test and validate our predictions.
How did you choose to work with bioinformatics and structural biology?
─ Since my school days I have been interested in evolution, genetics and natural history. By the end of my Genetics BSc a rich treasure trove of genomic data was beginning to become available for analysis. I wanted to study molecular evolution for my PhD, but it was apparent that this was only possible by learning to code to handle and make sense of the ever-increasing amounts of data.
─ My Masters in Bioinformatics gave me the skills I needed to dive into molecular data and subsequently complete a PhD on protein evolution. This is also what I focused on when I started my own group, shifting focus from universally conserved proteins of translation to the weird, wonderful, and fast evolving world of microbial immune systems. Until just a few years ago, our work was largely limited to sequence-level analyses, but this all changed with the release of the AlphaFold2 code in 2021, when we could start predicting structures of proteins and multi-protein complexes in a high-throughput mode.
What did you think of this years’ Nobel prize, which went (partly) to the people who developed Alphafold?
─ The prize is very well deserved and timely. It is hard to overstate the impact of recent developments in protein structure prediction in biochemistry, biology and medicine. AlphaFold has had a profound effect on the way we do science in my group, and we are excited for future improvements and code release.
─ It is important to me that all researchers in Sweden can have access to this powerful technique, regardless of whether they have any previous experience with bioinformatics or structural biology. Therefore, we have established a national infrastructure called LU-Fold (http://medicine.lu.se/lu-fold) that specializes in running AlphaFold in medium to high-throughput code to predict new molecular interactions.
Who should listen to your talk?
─ People who are curious why bacteria carry around deadly protein toxins that poison the cells that encode them, along with the antitoxins that are the antidotes to those poisons. Microbiologists have been curious about this question for decades, but now the work of multiple groups has revealed the biological function of at least some toxin-antitoxin systems.
Come and listen to Gemma Atkinson’s talk at SCS2025, which will take place at the Steam Hotel in Västerås, just one hour by train from Stockholm, from June 16 to 18, 2025. Representatives from all fields of chemistry are invited, and the program includes inspiring presentations, interactive poster sessions, and ample networking opportunities.
Read more at https://scs2025.se/
Read more about Gemma Atkinson’s research here: Gemma Atkinson – Lund University