Bret Church

Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Pharmacy.

Qualifications

BSc (Hons), DipEd, PhD

Contact Details

University of Sydney
Phone: +61 2 9036 6569
Fax: +61 2 9351 4391
Email: b.church@pharm.usyd.edu.au
Room 502
Badham Building A16
The University of Sydney
NSW 2006 Australia

Key Works

My interests are in structural biology and particularly the use of biophysical techniques and structural bioinformatics to help understand the relationships between drug targets and drugs to be applied to drug discovery.

Over 400 depositions to the Protein Data Bank are made every month. Each coordinate set may be a new structure, a structure with a new inhibitor or mutant. Structural genomics is also providing more data in the quest for realistic assessments of molecular recognition and interaction, which are the basis for all cellular processes, and therefore of great interest for studies in therapeutic intervention. With the progress in genomic sequencing, automated tools for the prediction of the function of proteins may be a way to expedite the analysis of protein sequences and therefore assist in the discovery of potential drug targets. We are interested in the analysis of available protein structures to further prediction methods. Of great importance was the availability of the bovine rhodopsin crystal structure, representing the first highly resolved G-protein coupled receptor structure. It can be the basis of comparative modelling of other G-protein coupled receptors.

Areas of specific interest are G-protein coupled receptors, other membrane bound targets and the inflammatory cascade

Research Interests

• Galanin Receptors: Recent Developments and Potential Use as Therapeutic Targets. Zahra Fathi, W. Bret Church and Tiina P. Iismaa (1999),
  Annual Reports in Medicinal Chemistry 33, 41-50.
• Crystallization and preliminary X-ray diffraction studies of a new crystal form of human secretory Type IIA phospholipase A2. W. Bret Church, Pei-Wen Lei and Kieran F. Scott (2000)Acta Crystallographica Section D., 56, 1482-1484.
• A novel approach to the design of secretory phospholipase A2 inhibitors based on native peptide inhibition. W. Bret Church, A.S. Inglis, A. Tseng, R. Duell, P.-W. Lei, K.J. Bryant and K.F. Scott (2001). J. Biol. Chem., 276, 33156-33164.
• Modelling of the structural features of integral-membrane proteins using REPIMPS (Reverse-Environment Prediction of Integral Membrane Protein Structure). Siavoush Dastmalchi, Michael B. Morris and W. Bret Church (2001) Protein Science, 10, 1529-1538.
• Molecular Modelling and Site-Directed Mutagenesis of Human GALR1 Galanin Receptor Defines Determinants of Receptor Subtype Specificity. W. Bret Church, Sandy Kuiper, Kathryn Jones, John Shine and Tiina Iismaa (2002) Protein Engineering, 15, 313-323.
• A new approach to protein structure and function analysis using semi-structured database. William M. Shui, Raymond K. Wong, Stephen C. Graham, Lawrence K. Lee and W. Bret Church (2003) Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology, 19, 61-69.
• Presence of transient helical segments in the sequence of galanin-like peptide (GALP) evident from 1H NMR, circular dichroism and prediction studies. Siavoush Dastmalchi, W. Bret Church, Michael B. Morris, Tiina P. Iismaa, Joel P. Mackay (2004) J. Struct. Biol. 146, 261-271
• DjinnLite: a tool for customised gene transcript modelling, annotation-data enrichment and exploration. Erdahl T. Teber, Edward Crawford, Kent B. Bolton, Derek van Dyk, Peter R. Schofield, Vimal Kapoor, W. Bret Church (2006) BMC Bioinformatics. 7, 33.

Career History