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The Crick Magazine, Spring 2026

The Francis Crick Institute

Crick Lectures are delivered by leading internationally-renowned scientists from the Francis Crick Institute and elsewhere and cover the full spectrum of biomedical research. They aim to be relatively accessible to scientists in all biomedical disciplines, whilst also offering something for the specialist.

The talks are open to scientists from other institutes and universities from across London and beyond. You should have a minimum of graduate-level biological knowledge to attend and fully engage with these talks. Please pre-register if you would like to attend. Find out more. 

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Principal Group Leader Neil McDonald runs the Signalling and Structural Biology Lab at the Crick - his group studies enzymes called protein kinases to understand how they operate within the networks that drive biological decision-making processes such as cell differentiation, cell patterning and cell fate.

The lab uses molecular approaches to visualise the three-dimensional structure of assemblies of two related groups of protein kinases; receptor tyrosine kinases that face both outside and inside of the cell and membrane-associated serine/threonine kinases. Once activated, protein kinases add labels to their cellular targets to initiate, amplify or pass on messages within cells. They play critically important and complex roles in human physiology and diseases such as cancer.

The lab applies research techniques collectively referred to as structural biology. These methods include X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy and small angle X-ray scattering. Together they can be used to map the position of all atoms in the proteins we study allowing us to define their shape and molecular function. 

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