Craggs Timothy D.
Timothy D. Craggs
Dr Tim Craggs obtained his MSci in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 2002. After his PhD (Cambridge 2007) and a postdoc in St Andrews, he took up a Lindemann Fellowship at Yale University (2010), followed by senior postdoc positions at Oxford (Kapanidis Lab) and Bristol (Dillingham Lab). In 2016 he was appointed to a Lectureship in Chemical Biology at the University of Sheffield.
Single-molecule approaches provide unprecedented detail to the understanding of essential biological processes, as was recognized in the awarding of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Their unique advantage stems from the ability to go beyond the ensemble- and time-averaging of common biochemical techniques, enabling the identification and interpretation of asynchronous reactions, transient states, and rare sub-species.
Research in the Craggs Lab involves the development and application of single-molecule fluorescence techniques to addressing crucial questions across physics, chemistry and the life sciences.
Recent work has focussed on the development and application of single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET – a molecular ruler for the 30-90 Å scale) to questions of protein folding, and DNA transcription, replication and repair. These methods are capable of observing individual molecules and molecular interactions in real time, and understanding their dynamics.
In addition to this mechanistic work, we have shown we can use smFRET to measure absolute distances with angstrom accuracy, opening the door to FRET driven structural biology.
- Craggs TD (2017) Cool and dynamic: single-molecule fluorescence-based structural biology. Nature Methods, 14(2), 123-124.
- Nott TJ, Craggs TD & Baldwin AJ (2016) Membraneless organelles can melt nucleic acid duplexes and act as biomolecular filters. Nature Chemistry, 8(6), 569-575.
