The Biochemical Society Award for Significant Breakthrough or Achievement will be presented to Dr Zhao-Qing Luo in 2025. Zhao-Qing is a professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University. His research focuses on biochemical basis of bacterial infection using Legionella pneumophila as a model. One hallmark of L. pneumophila pathogenicity is its hundreds of virulence factors that function to modulate host processes to create an intracellular niche permissive for bacterial growth. His group has contributed significantly not only the identification but also functional characterization of many of these factors by revealing their unique biochemical activities and targets within host cells. He identified enzymes that catalyze reversible AMPylation and phosphorylcholination to regulate Rab1, a key signaling protein involved in vesicle trafficking. More notably, his group discovered a ubiquitination mechanism in which ubiquitin is activated by ADP-ribosylation using NAD as the energy source. These reactions are chemically distinct from the canonical three-enzyme cascade powered by ATP. He also found that these bacterial ubiquitin ligases are regulated by glutamylation catalyzed by pseudokinase-induced protein AMPylation. Work from the Luo group has revealed host function modulation by a wide variety of protein posttranslational modifications catalyzed by bacterial virulence factors, which have greatly expanded our understanding of cell signaling and the biochemical mechanisms underlying such modifications.

Zhao-Qing said: “I feel thrilled to be recognized by the prestigious Award from the Biochemical Society. It is a great honor for myself and for the many outstanding people with whom I have been fortunate to work with over the years. It reminds me of the many moments when we gained a glimpse of the activity of these cryptic proteins often after years of pursuit. I wish to thank my mentors at different stages of my career, my department, Purdue University, the funding agencies and my family for the support that enables my research."

The Biochemical Society Award for Sustained Excellence will be presented to Professor Robert Cross in 2025. Rob is a molecular motors enthusiast. Motors are fundamental to eukaryotic life, because they allow cells to self-organise. How molecular motors work has fascinated him all his working life.

Rob obtained his PhD in 1983 from the University of Nottingham and then won an EMBO long-term fellowship to work with J. Victor Small and Apolinary Sobieszek in Salzburg on the structure and mechanisms of smooth muscle myosin filaments. In 1986, he moved to MRC-LMB as an MDA fellow and alongside John Kendrick Jones, Clive Bagshaw and Mike Geeves, Rob was ultimately able to propose an explicit mechanism for myosin II self-assembly.

In 1991, he moved to the Marie Curie Research Institute (MCRI) and began work on kinesin, then newly-discovered. In 2005, Rob and Nick Carter found that kinesin can step processively backwards under load. This turned out to be key to its mechanochemical coupling, which, as they recently (2020) showed, combines tight-coupled forwards steps with loose-coupled backslips.

In 2009, the MCRI closed and Rob moved, with his friends Andrew McAinsh and Anne Straube, to the University of Warwick. At Warwick, Rob continues to interrogate the kinesin mechanism, but with an important paradigm shift, whereby the interlock between the mechanochemical mechanisms of kinesin and tubulin is paramount.

Rob said: "The Biochemical Society is a national treasure and I am grateful for this recognition of my work. I like the idea of an award for sustained progress - for me, science is about finding a good problem, splitting it into smaller problems, and working to solve those, as best one can, for as long as it takes."

The 2024 Biochemical Society Award - Significant Breakthrough or Achievement will be presented to Professor Paul Lehner. Paul’s work sits at the interface between immunology, virology and cell biology and he applies genetic and proteomic technologies to study viral interactions with the immune system. Prominent among these are his discoveries of novel pathways of viral evasion, his application of unbiased quantitative proteomics to understand how viruses remodel the infected cell, and his identification of epigenetic pathways for silencing DNA.

He discovered and characterised the Human Silencing Hub (HUSH), an epigenetic transcriptional repressor complex which silences DNA that has invaded the vertebrate genome. HUSH defends the host genome from first-line attack by silencing invading elements, including retroviruses and mobile endogenous retrotransposons e.g. LINE1 elements. He showed how HUSH has a remarkable ability to distinguish ‘self’ from ‘non-self’ DNA in the genome, a cellular compartment not thought to be visible to the immune system. This discrimination of ‘self’ from ‘non-self’ genomic DNA occurs through the recognition of ‘intronless’ cDNA, the hallmark of reverse transcription. The key function of HUSH is therefore to protect the genome from the reverse flow of genetic information i.e. RNA to DNA. Paul’s work has therefore revealed an unanticipated transcription-dependent mechanism of genome immune-surveillance, a novel function for cellular introns as well as a new arm of the innate immune system.

On winning the Biochemical Society Award - Significant Breakthrough or Achievement for 2024, Paul said: "It is a great honour to be the recipient of this Biochemical Society Award. It recognises the achievements of so many talented people I’ve been fortunate enough to work with in the lab – who together have made this award possible. I am also grateful to my mentors as well as the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council and Lister Institute for their generous support of our work."

The 2024 Biochemical Society Award - Sustained Excellence will be presented to Professor Joanna Wardlaw. Joanna, CBE, MD, FRSE, FMedSci, is Professor of Applied Neuroimaging at the University of Edinburgh, Foundation Chair in the UK Dementia Research Institute, and Consultant Neuroradiologist for NHS Lothian. Her work focuses on understanding the brain and its blood supply, and on treatments to improve blood flow to the brain, including thrombolytic drugs that are now in routine use to treat stroke, and more recently on treatments for small vessel disease and dementia. Working with many colleagues, she has been instrumental in advancing understanding of the causes of cerebral small vessel disease and is now testing promising treatments in clinical trials. She has set up national research imaging facilities, co-ordinated international research networks, advanced stroke care worldwide and published over 1000 papers. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences, she was awarded the American Heart Association’s Feinberg Award for Clinical Advances in Stroke in 2018, the European Stroke Organisation President’s Award (2017), the Karolinska Stroke Award (2018), the British Neuroscience Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Neuroscience (2021), and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Medicine and Neuroscience in 2016.

On winning the Biochemical Society Award - Sustained Excellence in 2024, Joanna said: "It is a huge honour to have been recognised by The Biochemical Society with the Sustained Excellence Award 2024. I feel deeply humbled, since my work is highly collaborative and depends on the contributions of many others, and grateful for the attention that this award will bring to our efforts to improve the lives of people affected by brain blood vessel diseases."

The 2019 Biochemical Society Award was presented to Paul Bieniasz from The Rockefeller University, USA. Paul has made major contributions to our understanding of HIV-1 replication. His group helped to elucidate how the ESCRT proteins are recruited by HIV-1 and other viruses to drive particle release, resolved controversies over the location in the cell where HIV-1 virion assembly occurs and illuminated how HIV-1 packages its RNA genome. With collaborators he developed techniques that allowed the first moving images of the genesis of individual virus particles in living cells to be captured. His group has also discovered several host antiviral mechanisms, including proteins that prevent the release of viral particles from cells, inhibit nuclear import of incoming HIV-1 DNA and enable recognition and elimination of non-self RNA molecules based on their nucleotide composition. His group used knowledge of host variation in antiviral proteins to break host range barriers and develop a macaque model of HIV-1 infection. He has also pioneered the field of ‘paleovirology’, showing that extinct retroviruses and their proteins can be resurrected in functional form from molecular fossils that are present in modern genomes.

Of winning the Biochemical Society Award, Paul said “I am surprised and delighted to be receiving the Biochemical Society Award. This honor recognizes the efforts and achievements of colleagues, past and present, as much as it does my own work. I am especially grateful to my wife and scientific partner, Theodora Hatziioannou, who has made me a better man and a better scientist”.

The 2017 Biochemical Society Award was awarded to Keith Gull from the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. Keith has a special interest in the biochemistry of the microtubule cytoskeleton, cell motility and division. He has made a major contribution to understanding the molecular components of the microtubule cytoskeleton and how it operates in flagellar motility, cell division, and morphogenesis of the African trypanosome. His work has led to the establishment of novel insights into the evolution of the cytoskeleton and its components. He has served on numerous government, learned society and medical charity committees as well as the governing bodies and science advisory committees of many institutes in the UK and Europe. He has had a long-term interest in graduate education and the careers of young scientists. Professor Gull has organised many courses for young African scientists in sub-Saharan Africa.  

Discover Sir Tom Blundell's article published in Biochemical Society Transactions:

Genomes, structural biology and drug discovery: combating the impacts of mutations in genetic disease and antibiotic resistance | Biochemical Society Transactions | Portland Press

Discover Sir Michael Berridge's article published in Biochemical Society Transactions:

Calcium signalling remodelling and disease