Prof. Jonas Emsley(image by SIMM)

On 12 July 2011, Prof. Jonas Emsley from Nottingham University visited Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica for academic exchanges and delivered an academic lecture titled “Structural studies of platelet receptors and coagulation factors (Protein-protein interactions involved in hemostasis as targets for drug design to prevent cardiovascular disease)”. Interrupting protein-protein interaction is a hot and hard topic in drug design. Prof. Emsley determined the crystal structure of FXI and modeled the complex structures of FXI with its ligands. At last he showed a small peptide to enhance the affinity of the A1 domain of plasma von Willebrand factor (vWF) for the platelet receptor glycoprotein Ibalpha (GPIbalpha) which is a ligand of FXI, which could be used as targets for drug design to prevent cardiovascular disease.

Prof. Emsley obtained his first degree in 1989 from the university of Nottingham and PhD from Birkbeck College in 1995, then work as Postdoctoral Research Associate in Purdue University and Leicester University from 1995 to 2000. Now he is a professor in Macromolecular Crystallography, School of Pharmacy University of Nottingham. His research interests include determining protein structures and studying the structure/function of complexes formed with drugs and natural ligands. He has published many papers in Cell, EMBO J, Nat Struct Mol Biol., Blood, and JBC.

(Source: Professor Weiliang Zhu’s group)