What can cone snail venom teach us about peptides and new medicines?
Anne Conibear joins Søren and AJ to explain how small chemical changes can affect protein and peptide behavior in the cell.
A lockdown project investigating cone snail venom gave Anne the opportunity to explore how these slow-moving predators use potent peptide toxins to paralyze their prey and how small modifications can make those toxins even more effective.
She also discusses how scientists build and study proteins in the lab and how understanding post-translational changes could eventually help develop more targeted medicines.
Anne reflects on a career that has taken her from South Africa to Australia and Europe and what she’s learned from working in different research cultures. The discussion moves into the different priorities of academia and industry, how teaching has helped shape Anne’s career, and what the future might hold for peptide medicines.
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In this episode
About the guest
Anne Conibear is an assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Synthetic Chemistry at the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien). Her research combines peptide chemistry and structural biology to understand how proteins are modified after they’re made and how those changes affect their behavior. Her work has touched on everything from improving our understanding of cone snail venom to proteins involved in DNA packing in the cell.
Dose of Discovery is cohosted by Søren Hough and Ayokunmi Ajetunmobi (AJ) and produced by Suze Cooper.
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You can find a fully annotated transcript of the episode here.