Prof. Martin Ryan
University of St Andrews, UK
Biography
Martin D Ryan has cloned and sequenced the genome of Enterovirus Type 70 as a part of his Ph.D. research work. He then went on to work on FMDV polyprotein processing at the Pirbright Institute. After moving to University of St. Andrews in 1994 he continued this work, focusing on the mechanism of FMDV 2A-mediated ‘cleavage’ – showing it was not a proteolytic element, but mediated a novel form of translational recoding – ‘ribosome skipping’. Other lines of research led to the development of 2A as a protein co-expression system – now used very widely in biotechnology and biomedicine. In 2017, he was awarded the Unilever Colworth Prize for his work on 2A. More recently, his laboratory has been working on FMDV RNA replication using a replicon system encoding fluorescent proteins such that FMDV RNA replication can be monitored by live-cell imaging.