Jonathan Heddle completed his PhD in biochemistry at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. After obtaining the prestigious Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research, he conducted structural biology research at the Yokohama City University in Japan. In 2007, Professor Heddle created his own laboratory at the Tokyo Institute of Technology where he focused on bionanotechnology. Then, he started his own laboratory at the RIKEN research centre in Wakō, Japan, where he additionally investigated the aging process. In 2015 he began working at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology of the Jagiellonian University in Poland where he leads the Bionanoscience and Biochemistry Laboratory.
The purpose of Professor Heddle’s team is to understand and create functional biological nanomachines, using biological molecules. They also investigate natural nanomachines such as DNA gyrase in order to understand their functioning and to apply them in the development of new drugs. One of the successes of Professor Heddle’s Lab was creating an ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage that apparently defies the rules of geometry and which may be used in materials science and medicine. The results of their research were published in the prestigious journal Nature in May 2019.
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