Professor Gavin H Thomas

Research

Overview

Research in the Thomas lab largely focusses on bacterial responses to stress and the movement of small molecules across bacterial membranes. Much of our work is done in collaboration with industry and finding opportunities to combine fundamental discovery with direct application of the work. This includes some flagship projects with Unilever on the discovery of bacterial mechanisms for the production of human body odour, to work on the discovery of use of bacterial transporters for improving the properties of bacteria used in industrial biotechnology.

Over many years we have also taken a lead in the characterisation of bacterial tripartite ATP-independent periplasmic (TRAP) transporters and more recently, in collaboration with Professor Gregor Hagelueken from the University of Bonn, Germany, have been able to elucidate the mechanism of these interesting multicomponent systems. The substrate for our model TRAP transporter, sialic acid, is a representative of the nonulonsonic acids, which we study in collaboration with Professor Martin Fascione in the Department of Chemistry in York, as key molecules that are found within the bacterial cell envelope.

A current large BBSRC funded sLoLa project aims to understand the function of an ancient bacterial membrane stress response, which includes colleagues from York, Cambridge, Newcastle and Nottingham. The previous BBSRC-funded DETOX project led to the creation of the MORF web tool which we are developing now with commercial clients as a viable research tool for functional discovery. 

For more details of our research stories, publications and research team see our lab webpage.

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