Congratulations to our group member, Dominik Saman, who successfully complete his viva today. We are happy that he chose to stay on in our group as PDRA.




Earlier in the year, submitting his thesis, while the group has his back.

We are very happy to have completed our move to the new Biochemistry building. We are now part of the new Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery and really enjoy our new surroundings.

After what felt like half a lifetime, the group finally managed to get together face to face, making use of the relaxed rules on outdoor meetings.



Our captain steered us through rough waters in the past year.


Oxford summers are the best……



All you need is a punt, a pint and a great bunch of scientists to make the best of a sunny day on the River Cherwell.

Congratulations to our alumnus Reid Alderson, who has just been awarded the Raymond Andrew Prize for his outstanding thesis "Protein folding investigated by NMR spectroscopy". The prize will be given to him at the EUROMAR Conference in July 2021. Well done, Reid!

Dear all, the Benesch group wishes you a very merry festive period. It has been an unusual year, but we are happy to report that we had lots of fun and good work was done in the past few months.



Shortly before Christmas, Secret Santa and his elf were wizzing around Oxford(shire) to deliver little presents to all group members.


Heres to a great year 2021!

We are still here! Albeit remotely, we are still a group. We meet for online group meetings, pass like ships at night when we work shifts in the lab, met outdoors in groups of six, have online tea times and chat on other channels, about our days, our work and our worries. We also welcome new group members in our midst - hello Ellie! It takes more than a pandemic to keep us from being in together.

Microsoft Teams needs to work on their together mode, though….

Professor Justin Benesch and Professor Philipp Kukura received the Commercial Impact Award 2020 for their contributions to the development of technology for a new way of measuring mass - mass photometry - in their spin-out company Refeyn. Congratulations!

We welcome Guodong Cao, Wiktoria Sadowska, Angela Gehrckens, Josh Bishop, Luke Smith and Catie Lichten to our group. Here's to a busy new academic year and a lovely wintery season in Oxford.

We are pleased to present the new, redesigned website for the Benesch group.
Please let us know what you like and what we could do better!

Proteins need to be tough: many respond to mechanical forces, which means that they bounce back from repeated cycles of forces which physically alter their structure, stretching or squishing them out of shape. Now a new paper led by Drs Justin Benesch and Katja Gehmlich has identified interactions which might stop a protein found in the heart from literally overextending itself. The resulting paper has now been published in Science Advances and can be accessed here.

As we have to say farewell to our PartIIs and as a celebration of Shane now being Dr. Chandler, we did what you have to do in summertime in Oxford: a punt and a pint. We are happy that all enjoyed their stay at the Benesch group and wish them all the best for future endeavours.

It is only June but already three of our papers published in 2019 were elected cover papers! We are proud of the collaborative effort of all involved in getting this amazing science out there.

We are incredibly proud that Justin is the 2019 Norman Heatley Award winner. The Royal Society of Chemistry awarded him for developing physicochemical approaches to deliver quantitative insight into molecular chaperones in health and disease. Congratulations!

We are very happy to announce a new Dr in the house! Congrats to Dr Olga Tkachenko!

Our team has four new members. Please extend a warm welcome to Zihao Wang (left), Dominik Saman (2nd left), Max Hantke (centre), and Oz Kilim (not pictured), photographed at a recent outing.

Justin was awarded the Howard Prize Lecture by the University of Durham's Biophysical Sciences Institute. The international award is named in honour of Professor Judith Howard CBE FRS, who was a post-graduate student in Oxford with Dorothy Hodgkin. Previous winners include David Nelson (Harvard), Sarah Veatch (Michigan) and Arwen Pearson (Hamburg).

We were delighted to have Ulrik Mistarz (Rand Group, Copenhagen) join the group for a month to probe protein complexes using our gas-phase HDX system. Ulrik had a successful COST Short Term Scientific Mission (STSM) with plenty of chance to discuss ideas, try exploratory experiments on the activation of protein assemblies, and share the knowledge of both groups. We enjoyed having you Ulrik!

14 months after open-heart surgery at Leeds General Infirmary, Shane completed the Great North Run half marathon, in under 2.5 hours. Shane raised £1600 for the British Heart Foundation, a charity that funds research (including some of ours) into cardiovascular disease. We are all very proud of his achievement, testament to his hard work and perseverance since last summer.

Reid, Miranda, and Olya journeyed to Croatia in September for the 13th Greta Plfat Mrzljak International School of Biophysics with support from the COST Action on Native MS They participated in hands-on workshops, attended lectures on the principles and application of various techniques used to tackle diverse biomacromolecular assemblies, and met other biophysicists from around the globe – while sailing the Adriatic, from Split to Šibenik, Sali, Zadar, and Stari Grad.

Heidi successfully defended her Phd today. Her thesis concerned the structure and function of HSP27, and various disease variants thereof. Her examiners were Christine Slingsby, the godmother of small heath-shock protein structure and Professor Emeritus at Birkbeck College London, and Emily Flashman from our department, who is an expert in chemical biology and structural methods. Heidi first joined the group in 2009, when we were in Cambridge as an undergraduate student, before returning for a PhD in 2012. We will miss Heidi, and wish her all the best at UCB!

Shane attended the 2016 American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference in San Antonio, Texas, earlier this summer. The biggest mass spectrometry conference of the year, it is an excellent means to learn about the wide variety of applications that are enabled by the technique, as well as the instrumental developments that are being pursued. He presented a poster on his work on gas-phase HDX as a means of probing gas-phase conformations. This provided a great opportunity to discuss his work with the wider international community.

Shane visited the group of Kasper Rand, University of Copenhagen, for two weeks to further his work on the application of gas-phase HDX to native protein systems. This was a project enabled by a Short Term Scientific Mission (STSM) award from the COST Action on native mass spectrometry. Shane enjoyed his productive time developing the technique with the group, having and the opportunity to exchange ideas with them, and sample the delights of Copenhagen!

On the 10th of April, we hosted a working group meeting of the COST on Native MS at University College, Oxford. The meeting focussed on computational methods: 23 delegates, including 5 speakers from outside the EU, engaged in a detailed discussion on how to advance the field, develop principles of best-practice, and establish standards for the use of Native MS.

Miranda presented her work at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in Los Angeles, California. She spoke in a platform session on Protein Stability, Folding, and Chaperones about tackling dynamic, heterogeneous protein assemblies using native mass spectrometry, and its application in the study of a mechanism underlying cardiomyopathy.

At the same meeting, Justin organised the Molecular Biophysics symposium, on a theme of "New methods for studying the structural dynamics of macromolecules", with invited speakers Dorothee Kern, Bryony Yorke, Philipp Kukura, Matteo dal Peraro, Juergen Plitzko, Tuomas Knowles and Charlotte Uetrecht. Over 500 delegates came to the symposium, the largest attendance at the entire conference!

This year we went to Devon for our annual retreat, staying at Great Horner Farm, near Totnes. A combination of talking about science, discussing future research and career plans, and long walks in the countryside, and evenings of mini golf…

Georg successfully defended his DPhil today, making him the first pillar-to-post student to pass through our doors. Thank you to his examiners were Tuomas Knowles (Chemistry, Cambridge), and Jason Schnell (Biochemistry, Oxford). Georg is still with us for a couple of months, before he moves to Chicago for a post-doc with Joe Thornton, working on protein evolution.

We are all sad to say goodbye to Dale, who is leaving us after two years’ postdoc-ing. He is moving to take up a new post at the LGC, where he will be bringing his expertise in mass spectrometry based structural investigations. The leaving party at the St Aldate’s Tavern was a fitting send off!

Merry Christmas from us all (courtesy of Matteo’s coarse-grained modelling toolbox)! We celebrated at the St Aldate’s Tavern, before the group scattered to all corners of the globe for a well deserved break (other than those who had lost their passports, of course).

It was also an opportunity for us to thank and say good bye to Heath Ecroyd, who visited us for 6 weeks at the end of autumn, and sadly returns to Wollongong.

We took delivery of our Waters Synapt G2-S hydogen/deuterium exchange mass spectrometry set-up today. We will be using the instrument to investigate the motions that proteins undergo, and how the fluctuations of protein structure on the tertiary level predicate assembly and disassembly.

Unfortunately the location of the lab meant it had to be craned in through a third-floor window!

A number of people from the group were giving talks this month: Olya and Heidi were presenting at the Molecular Chaperone Club in Amsterdam, and Matteo (it’s not rocket science!) at the Symposium for Structural Proteomics in Antwerp.

And also special mention for Erik, whose poster on “Collisional Cross-Sections for Structural Proteomics” earned him the poster prize at the same conference.

This year we have welcomed eight new group members: Miranda, Reid and Shane are all starting PhDs; Jordan is here for a two-year Master’s; Anna, John and Nick are doing their Part II projects; and Yusuf is a visiting student.

So, plenty of reasons for a group evening out at The Cape of Good Hope and Oxford’s Grill!

For our first ever group retreat we headed to the beautiful Shropshire countryside for three days, staying at Mindy Mundy Farm on the Pitchford estate. Mornings were spent discussing science, brainstorming new ideas, thinking about what the important questions that should be answered in our field are, and considering what our priorities for the next year are. The second afternoon we went hiking up Long Mynd, in the Shropshire Hills “area of national beauty”. Half the group cooked the first night, and the other half the second, but both evenings ended with everyone crowded around the bonfire outside. The question is only, where do we go next year?

Georg and Art’s paper on the ability of the core domain of αB-crystallin to prevent amyloid aggregation and toxicity has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. This work was a collaboration with David Eisenberg’s group in UCLA and Heath Ecroyd’s in Wollongong, and colleagues in Oxford.

Georg has also written a review on the dynamical underpinnings of αB-crystallin, published in a special issue of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology on the eye lens crystallins that was edited by Christine Slingsby and Graeme Wistow.

The slides from Justin’s tutorial lecture on native mass spectrometry for structural and dynamical proteomics are available for download here. These were given as part of the Proteins@Work course in Turku, Finland.

The slides from Justin’s talk at the French school for Ion Mobility and Mass Spectrometry are available for download here. The section on calibration refers directly to Kevin Pagel’s (Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin) excellent talk and calibration spreadsheet that can be accessed from his website. A zip file of all the talks can be found here.

Justin has been awarded the Alfred Tissières Award of Cell Stress Society International. This award is presented every two years to a young investigator in the field of cellular stress and heat shock, and is named after one of its pioneers. Part of the award is a copy of George Band’s book “The Road to Rakopashi”, describing the expedition of the Cambridge Mountaineering Club that Alfred led in 1954 to climb this fabled peak. [Painting: "Tibet. Monastery in the mountains (Rakopashi)", 1940, Nicholas Roerich]

Matteo's structural study on the pore-forming toxin Aerolysin, a major part of his PhD in the group of Matteo Dal Peraro at EPFL, was recently published in Nature Chemical Biology. By combining experimental and computational approaches, his results provide near-atomic detail on the mechanisms of  assembly and insertion into the host cell membrane. Matteo was interviewed about this work, and research in general, by the Swiss radio RSR: two clips (in french) are here, and here (min 6:20).

The slides from Justin’s mass spectrometry tutorial lecture at the EBSA Satellite Meeting in Bionanotechnology are available for download, together with some background references. The material is an introduction to the MS approaches used in biophysics, together with a few examples from our group and others.

Justin and Weston will both be attending the ASMS Annual Conference in Minneapolis. Come find Weston at his poster “The effects of protein glycation on structural dynamics of αB-crystallin” (TP641 on Thursday) and listen to Justin talking on “Exploiting IM-MS separation to overcome heterogeneity in protein self-assembly” (TOG 10:10am on Tuesday). More details are in the programme.

The recording of the Discovery & Life Science Webinar Series webinar from Justin on protein structure determination using mass spectrometry is now available online, together with that by Kasper Rand from the University of Copenhagen.

On the 17th April, Justin will be giving the opening seminar of the Discovery & Life Science Webinar Series, speaking on using mass spectrometry for rapid protein structure determination. Kasper Rand from the University of Copenhagen is the other speaker in the same session. Registration is available here.

The 1st BMSS ion mobility special interest group meeting is to be held next on the 16th April, at UCB. More information to be found here. Erik will be speaking about his work on collision cross section calculations.