Walsh Group at Diamond

Our research is using a targeted structural and functional approach to understanding at the molecular level how bacteria cause disease. We have focused our efforts in the main part on bacterial pathogens that continue to pose a significant health risk to the very young and elderly and have identified a number of vital processes within these pathogens to characterize and assess as targets for drug discovery. Our interests lie predominately in understanding the mechanisms used by bacterial pathogens to adhere to the host cell surfaces and the regulation of virulence. Presently we have several projects focused on understanding specific processes important to bacterial pathogenesis in three important human pathogens Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Due to the COVID19 pandemic, our activities have been partially diverted to applying a structure based drug discovery approach to the two cysteine proteases of SARS-CoV-2. We've taken a completely open-access approach to this work and a full summary along with experimental data can be found here.  

Our location at the Research Complex next to Diamond Light Source gives the Walsh Group excellent access to state-of-the-art facilities for x-ray crystallography, SAXS and cryo-EM amongst many other structural, biophysical and functional techniques.