Andrew P Carter | |
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| Alma mater |
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| Awards | EMBO Member (2016) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral advisor | Venki Ramakrishnan |
| Other academic advisors | Ron Vale |
| Website | www2 |
Andrew P. Carter FRS is a British structural biologist who works at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK. He is known for his work on the microtubule motor dynein. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Carter studied Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1999. [5] He obtained a PhD in 2003 from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology where he worked with Venki Ramakrishnan on the ribosome. He was a member of the team in Ramakrishnan's lab that solved the first X-ray crystal structure of the small (30S) ribosomal subunit. [6] Carter also determined structures of 30S bound to antibiotics [7] and bound to the initiation factor IF1. [8] Ramakrishnan shared the Nobel prize in Chemistry for the team's work on the 30S. [9]
Carter was a post-doc in Ron Vale's lab [10] at University of California, San Francisco from 2003 to 2010. During his post-doc, he studied the molecular motor protein, dynein using X-ray crystallography and single molecule fluorescence microscopy. [11] [12]
He became a group leader at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 2010 where he uses X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, and single molecule microscopy assays to understand how dynein transports cargo. His group solved X-ray crystal structures of the dynein motor domain showing how it generates force to pull cargos along microtubules [1] and reconstituted a recombinant dynein, showing how its processive movement is activated by cofactors/cargo adaptors. [13] His group used cryoEM to solve the structure of dynein's cofactor dynactin [2] and the full length dynein complex. [3] They showed how dynein and dynactin come together in the presence of cargos and how this activates transport.