Carnegie Mellon University
June 17, 2016

Murphy receives grant from new international collaboration program

bob.jpgBob Murphy and his collaborator Christoph Wülfing from the University of Bristol have just received grants from a new program encouraging collaboration between U.S. and U.K. investigators. The program, run jointly by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, allows the investigators to submit a single proposal that is reviewed by only one of the agencies: if it scores highly, the second agency simply accepts the recommendation of the first. The project builds on their work described in a recent major paper in Science Signaling. The project will involve analyzing fluorescence microscope movies to create spatiotemporal maps of proteins involved in signaling by T cells, a key component of the immune system. The maps will be combined with data on cell-wide protein phosphorylation and used both to infer potential signaling complexes, and to estimate the apparent affinities and potential causal relationships amongst proteins involved in T lymphocyte signaling.