Edmund Kunji
Leader at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, UK
Edmund Kunji is Programme Leader at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge. He studied Physics, Mathematics, Biology and Chemistry at the University of Groningen and received a M.Sc. both in Biology and in Chemistry. After a scientific stay as visiting scholar with Abdul Matin at Stanford University, he did his Ph.D. in Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Groningen under supervision of Wil Konings and Bert Poolman.
As EMBO Post-Doctoral Fellow, he joined the group of Nobel Laureate Richard Henderson at the MRC, Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Edmund Kunji´s research interests focus on the identification and the functional and structural characterization of transport proteins in the inner mitochondrial membrane and aim at elucidating their physiological roles as well as the molecular cause for diseases that are associated with their dysfunction.
Selected publications
  • Tavoulari S, Thangaratnarajah C, Mavridou V, Harbour ME, Martinou JC, Kunji ER (2019). The yeast mitochondrial pyruvate carrier is a hetero-dimer in its functional state. EMBO J. 38: e100785. doi: 10.15252/embj.2018100785
  • Ruprecht JJ, King MS, Zögg T, Aleksandrova AA, Pardon E, Crichton PG, Steyaert J, Kunji ERS (2019). The molecular mechanism of transport by the mitochondrial ADP/ATP carrier. Cell 176: 435-447e15. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.11.025
  • Majd H, King MS, Palmer SM, Smith AC, Elbourne LD, Paulsen IT, Sharples D, Henderson PJ, Kunji ER (2018). Screening of candidate substrates and coupling ions of transporters by thermostability shift assays. Elife 7: e38821. doi: 10.7554/eLife.38821
  • Crichton PG, Lee Y, Ruprecht JJ, Cerson E, Thangaratnarajah C, King MS, Kunji ER (2015). Trends in thermostability provide information on the nature of substrate, inhibitor, and lipid interactions with mitochondrial carriers. J. Biol. Chem. 290: 8206-8217. doi: 10.1074/jbc.M114.616607
  • Ruprecht JJ, Hellawell AM, Harding M, Crichton PG, McCoy AJ, Kunji ER (2014). Structures of yeast mitochondrial ADP/ATP carriers support a domain-based alternating-access transport mechanism. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 111: E426-34. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1320692111