Staff Profile
Professor Wyatt Yue
Professor of Structural Biology
- Telephone: +44 (0)191 2088796
- Personal Website: https://wyattyue.github.io
- Address: Catherine Cookson Building M3.008
Medical School
Framlington Place
Newcastle University NE2 4HH
Biography
Wyatt Yue is a structural biologist with an MA (Biochemistry) from University of Oxford, and a PhD (Crystallography) from Birkbeck College London. Wyatt recently takes up the Chair of Structural Biology at Newcastle University Biosciences Institute, after leading the Metabolic & Rare Disease team at Centre for Medicines Discovery University of Oxford for over a decade. In 2021 he was awarded the inaugural Harrington UK Rare Disease Scholar. His research over the years has been supported by funds from charity (e.g. Wellcome, LifeArc), patient organisations (e.g. Action Medical Research), and the biotech/pharma industry (e.g. Pfizer). Wyatt sits on the steering committee for the Newcastle Centre for Rare Diseases, and holds a visiting professorship at University of Oxford.
Wyatt specialises in the use of structural, biochemical and chemical biology approaches to study diverse metabolic protein families in the human genome. His team has to date determined structures by x-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, of >70 different human metabolic enzymes and complexes (>240 structures in total). Wyatt’s team adopts novel approaches in recombinant co-expression and endogenous isolation of multi-enzyme complexes, to delineate protein-protein interactions. Recent work includes frataxin-FeS cluster assembly complex, glycogenin-glycogen synthase complex, and TRiC chaperonin.
The team’s vision is to translate basic science into design of small molecule therapeutics for rare diseases with unmet need. Disease-associated metabolic enzymes often lead to aberrant flux and accumulation of toxic metabolites. Therefore, pathway manipulation to reduce flux to the defective enzyme, through substrate reduction apparoch, could have therapeutic benefit. To this end, Wyatt’s team has carried out crystallography-based fragment screening for novel targets GALK1, HAO1, ALAS2 and AASS to kick-start hit discovery and H2L programmes.
Group page
www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/yuelab/
Personal page
wyattyue.github.io
@TheYueLab
Lecturer & Practical leader, BGM2060 - Stage 2 lectures and practical in Proteins and Enzymes
Lecturer, BGM2062 - Stage 2 lectures in Advanced Protein Analysis
Module co-Leader & Lecturer, BGM3064 - Stage 3 lectures in Applied Biochemistry
Lecturer, MMB8018 - MRes seminar