Professor Robert Neely

• PhD in Physical Chemistry, University of Edinburgh, 2005
• MChem, University of Edinburgh, 2001

Rob Neely graduated with a MChem from Edinburgh in 2001. He completed his PhD in Edinburgh in 2005, working in Anita Jones’s group on the application of time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy to study the DNA duplex. He was awarded an EPSRC post doctoral fellowship at the Life Sciences Interface (Edinburgh) and spent a year with Nobel Laureate, Sir Richard Roberts at New England Biolabs, MA as part of this work.

Rob moved to Johan Hofkens’ group in Leuven, Belgium in 2009 to take up a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship and was subsequently awarded an ‘Innovatiemandaat’ by the Flemish Government in 2012 to pursue the development of a single-molecule DNA mapping platform.

Rob took up his post in Birmingham in July 2014 and has since been awarded major grants from the EU and the EPSRC (Healthcare Technologies Challenge Award).

Teaching programmes

• Molecules and Materials in Biomedicine, Sci-Phy Centre for Doctoral Training
• Photochemistry, Chemistry

Themes

• Single-molecule imaging
• Fluorescence microscopy
• Fluorescence spectroscopy
• DNA
• DNA methyltransferase enzymes
• DNA mapping
• Super-resolution microscopy

Activity

Sequence-specific DNA modification using the DNA Methyltransferase enzymes.

Nature has evolved exquisite specificity, of which the DNA methyltransferase enzymes are just one fascinating example. In bacteria, these enzymes are part of the bacterium’s defence mechanism against viral invasion. We use these enzymes to deliver functional groups to DNA molecules at specific sequence motifs. This is leading to a range of novel applications including the development of a new DNA mapping technology that can be used as a rapid screen for pathogens.

Single-molecule fluorescence microscopy

We frequently observe chemical and biological processes at the ensemble level. What this means is that, in these experiments, we measure an average signal from the entire population of molecules in the system. In biology, this can be misleading since it is often those few molecules in a system that are behaving differently to the others that are really determining the system’s behaviour. For example, a single mutated enzyme may develop off-target specificity that can lead to a cascade of potential problems in a cell. Our group is developing and applying new ways to study biological systems at the single-molecule level, predominantly using fluorescence microscopy.