Departmental research news

Of 3,500 proposals reviewed by the ERC, only 14% were selected for funding – Cambridge has the highest number of grants of any UK institution.

ERC Starting Grants – totalling nearly €780 million – support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, from life sciences and physics to social sciences and humanities.

The awards help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas. Starting Grants amount to €1.5 million per grant for a period of five years but additional funds can be made available.

In total, the grants are estimated to create 3,160 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at host institutions.

Cambridge’s recipients work in a wide range of fields including plant sciences, mathematics and medicine. They are among 494 laureates who will be leading projects at universities and research centres in 24 EU Member States and associated countries. This year, the UK has received grants for 50 projects, Germany 98, France 49, and the Netherlands 51.

Cambridge’s grant recipients for 2024 are:

Adrian Baez-Ortega (Dept. of Veterinary Medicine, Wellcome Sanger Institute) for Exploring the mechanisms of long-term tumour evolution and genomic instability in marine transmissible cancers

Claudia Bonfio (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology) for Lipid Diversity at the Onset of Life

Tom Gur (Dept. of Computer Science and Technology) for Sublinear Quantum Computation

Leonie Luginbuehl (Dept. of Plant Sciences) for Harnessing mechanisms for plant carbon delivery to symbiotic soil fungi for sustainable food production

Julian Sahasrabudhe (Dept. of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics) for High Dimensional Probability and Combinatorics

Richard Timms (Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease) for Deciphering the regulatory logic of the ubiquitin system

Hannah Übler (Dept. of Physics) for Active galactic nuclei and Population III stars in early galaxies

Julian Willis (Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry) for Studying viral protein-primed DNA replication to develop new gene editing technologies

Federica Gigante (Faculty of History) for Unveiling Networks: Slavery and the European Encounter with Islamic Material Culture (1580– 1700) – Grant hosted by the University of Oxford

 

Professor Sir John Aston FRS, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge, said:

“Many congratulations to the recipients of these awards which reflect the innovation and the vision of these outstanding investigators. We are fortunate to have many exceptional young researchers across a wide range of disciplines here in Cambridge and awards such as these highlight some of the amazing research taking place across the university. I wish this year’s recipients all the very best as they begin their new programmes and can’t wait to see the outcomes of their work.”

Iliana Ivanova, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said:

“The European Commission is proud to support the curiosity and passion of our early-career talent under our Horizon Europe programme. The new ERC Starting Grants winners aim to deepen our understanding of the world. Their creativity is vital to finding solutions to some of the most pressing societal challenges. In this call, I am happy to see one of the highest shares of female grantees to date, a trend that I hope will continue. Congratulations to all!”

President of the European Research Council, Prof. Maria Leptin, said:

“Empowering researchers early on in their careers is at the heart of the mission of the ERC. I am particularly pleased to welcome UK researchers back to the ERC. They have been sorely missed over the past years. With fifty grants awarded to researchers based in the UK, this influx is good for the research community overall.”

Nine Cambridge researchers are among the latest recipients of highly competitive and prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants.

Luginbuehl labPlant roots interacting with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Image: Luginbuehl lab

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Dr Alex Cagan – illustrator, geneticist and explorer of animal DNA – is offering a new perspective on the tapestry of life. His work has profound implications for the pursuit of healthy ageing and the possibilities of cancer resistance.

Progressive retinal atrophy (PRA) is a group of inherited diseases that causes progressive degeneration of the light sensitive cells at the back of the eye. Dogs with PRA have normal sight at birth, but by the age of four or five they will be totally blind. There is no treatment.

Now a team led by the University of Cambridge has identified the genetic mutation that causes PRA in English Shepherd Dogs, and developed a DNA test for it. By identifying dogs carrying the disease before their eyesight starts to fail, this provides a tool to guide breeding decisions so the disease is not passed on to puppies.

Owners usually don’t realise their dog has PRA until it is middle-aged, by which time it might have bred, and passed on the faulty gene to its puppies. This has made it a difficult disease to control.

The new discovery means that progressive retinal atrophy can now be completely eliminated from the English Shepherd Dog population very quickly.

The results are published today in the journal Genes.

“Once the dog’s eyesight starts to fail there’s no treatment – it will end up totally blind,” said Katherine Stanbury, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine and first author of the report.

She added: “Now we have a DNA test, there’s no reason why another English Shepherd Dog ever needs to be born with this form of progressive retinal atrophy – it gives breeders a way of totally eliminating the disease.”

The genetic mutation identified by the team is recessive, which means it only causes blindness if the English Shepherd Dog inherits two copies of it. If the dog only has one copy this makes it a carrier – it will not develop PRA but can pass the mutation on to its puppies. If two carriers are bred together, about one in four of the puppies will be affected with PRA.

Dogs breeds are very inbred, so many individuals are related – giving them a much higher chance of being affected by recessive diseases than humans.

The team began the research after being contacted by a distraught owner of an English Shepherd Dog that had been recently diagnosed with PRA. The dog had been working as a search and rescue dog but had to retire due to visual deterioration that has resulted in total blindness. The researchers put out a call for DNA samples from other owners or breeders of this breed, and received samples from six English Shepherds with PRA and twenty without it. This was enough for them to pinpoint the genetic mutation responsible for PRA using whole genome sequencing.

The team offers a commercial canine genetic testing service providing DNA tests to dog breeders to help them avoid breeding dogs that will develop inherited diseases. As part of this they will now offer a DNA test for Progressive Retinal Atrophy in English Shepherds. Anyone can buy a testing kit, costing just £48, to take a swab from inside their dog’s mouth and send it back for testing.

“An owner won't necessarily notice their dog has got anything wrong with its eyes until it starts bumping into the furniture. Unlike humans who will speak up if their sight isn’t right, dogs just have to get on with things,” said Dr Cathryn Mellersh in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, senior author of the report.

She added: “For the price of a decent bag of dog food people can now have their English Shepherd tested for Progressive Retinal Atrophy prior to breeding. It’s about prevention, rather than a cure, and it means a huge amount to the people who breed these dogs. They no longer need to worry about whether the puppies are going to be healthy or are going to develop this horrible disease in a few years’ time.”

The English Shepherd is a breed of herding dog popular in the United States and is closely related to the Border Collie.

The new discovery is the thirty-third genetic mutation causing an inherited disease in dogs that the team has found – twenty-three of which cause eye diseases. They say that the health and wellbeing of many dogs has been compromised because of how they have been bred by humans.

PRA occurs in many dog breeds including the English Shepherd Dog. And it is similar to a disease called retinitis pigmentosa in humans, which also causes blindness. The researchers say that their work with dogs could shed light on the human version of the disease and potentially identify targets for gene therapy in the future.

The work was carried out in collaboration with Wisdom Panel, Mars Petcare, as part of the Consortium to Research Inherited Eye Diseases in Dogs (CRIEDD), with funding from the Dog’s Trust and the Kennel Club Charitable Trust.

Reference: Stanbury, K. et al, ‘Exonic SINE insertion in FAM161A is associated with autosomal recessive progressive retinal atrophy in the English Shepherd.’ July 2024.

Cambridge scientists have identified the genetic mutation that causes progressive retinal atrophy in English Shepherd Dogs, which results in incurable blindness, and developed a genetic test to help eliminate the disease from future generations of the breed.

Now we have a DNA test, there’s no reason why another English Shepherd Dog ever needs to be born with this form of progressive retinal atrophy – it gives breeders a way of totally eliminating the disease.Katherine StanburyEnglish Shepherd puppy

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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