Edward Emmott
Dr Edward Emmott is a Wellcome Career Development Fellow in the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology.
What type of fellowship do you have?
Wellcome Career Development Award.
When did you start your fellowship?
April 2025.
What were you doing prior to your fellowship?
I was a Lecturer (formerly Tenure Track Fellow) in the Department of Biochemistry, Cell and Systems Biology within the Institute, and part of the Centre for Proteome Research. I joined the University of Liverpool in 2019.
Why did you choose to undertake your fellowship with the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences?
I was already in Liverpool, but what attracted me in the first place was the excellent Liverpool Shared Research Facilities (LIV-SRF). My research uses and develops proteomic methods which we apply to the study of virus-host interactions. Mass spectrometry is central to what we do, and my lab is linked to the Centre for Proteome Research. We also work with a lot of the other LIV-SRF facilities, for example we have had excellent collaborations with the Computational Biology Facillity and most recently with the Centre for Cell Imaging. There's also a lot of really good virology research happening around Liverpool, both within and outside the University.
How does Wellcome fund your work?
Wellcome provides me with protected research time, and has allowed me to recruit experts in sequencing, proteomics and viral reverse genetics to expand the research my lab is able to undertake, and the resources to support them for the 8 years of the award.
What is the aim of your research?
My lab is interested in understanding the fundamentals of how viruses replicate, and interact with the cells they infect. For many important human and animal pathogens, virus replication is regulated by the cleavage of long viral proteins into a range of fully- and partially-cleaved proteins which can have their own distinct functions. The timing of this process, can drive the events of virus replication. My fellowship supports our work in understanding how this process works and is conserved across human and avian coronaviruses.
Our current understanding of coronavirus replication, and its regulation by polyprotein processing remains limited, in spite of the fact that it affects the key viral proteins that are being targeted by drugs in use today – those targeting the coronavirus protease and polymerase. By better understanding the mechanisms of how viruses replicate and their regulation, we can use this knowledge to design more targeted treatments.
What inspired you to look at this field?
My undergraduate degree was in virology, so its safe to say I’ve been interested in viruses for a while! I find it incredible that something so simple, with fewer characters in its genome than there are letters in chapter 1 of the first Harry Potter book, can take on an organism that is far more complex (us!) and cause such devastation.
During my first postdoc I became fascinated by how the actions of a viral protease could regulate the events of virus replication, but also frustrated at the limitations of the methods that were available to study this. I’d always made use of mass spectrometry-based proteomics, but a second postdoc, focusing on proteomics helped me begin to develop the tools I needed to study this process further. Having used my TTF position to develop these tools, this fellowship now lets me apply them!