Professor
Jim
Kaufman
Professor
Jim
Kaufman
Professor
University of Edinburgh
Email
jim.kaufman [at] ed.ac.ukBiography
Jim Kaufman has been working on various aspects of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) for almost 50 years, much of that time trying to understand the evolution of the MHC by studying animals other than humans and mice, particularly chickens. He has worked at Harvard University as a PhD student, the Basel Institute for Immunology as his first independent position, the Institute for Animal Health as the head of the Division of Immunology, the University of Cambridge as the Professor of Comparative Immunogenetics, and now the University of Edinburgh as Chair of Immunology. He and his group continue to work from genes, genetics and genomics to biochemistry and cell biology, cellular immunology, infection studies and now to population genetics, all to understand the structure, function and evolution of immunity. Recently, people in the group have been studying not only chickens but also passerine birds, Tasmanian devils, rabbits and bats, along with work on T cell receptors, on natural killer receptors and ligands, and on a low-tech high-throughput experimental approach to determining T cell epitopes. Research interests
Our group works on a wide variety of hosts and pathogens, but mostly on chickens. Our latest work with chicken MHC molecules focuses on the identification of new MHC alleles and haplotypes, the peptide motifs and structures of these MHC molecules, the dedicated chaperones that optimise the peptide binding by MHC molecules, the theory of promiscuous generalist and fastidious specialist alleles, and development of a low-cost high-throughput method for epitope determination. Recently, we have also made advances in understanding the MHC system in wild birds and in rabbits. Projects you're working on
Currently, we finishing a 10-30 year effort to identify chicken MHC alleles and haplotypes in a wide variety of chicken populations, which has depended on a PCR-NGS (amplicon sequencing) pipeline which we developed. We are writing papers describing the methods including a dedicated bioinformatics pipeline, simplified methods for typing widely-researched chicken populations, a new nomenclature system to accommodate the hundreds of new alleles and haplotypes, PCR-NGS typing of commercial chickens, peptide motifs of novel alleles common among commercial chickens, and the response of T cells to promiscuous generalist and fastidious specialist MHC molecules. In addition, we have new structures for chicken class II molecules and the BF1 molecule, and a detailed analysis of the peptide motif for the dominantly-expressed class I molecule of the B21 haplotype (BF2*2101). We are also far along with analysing the chaperones of class I and class II molecules in chickens, including a tissue-specific class II system induced by helminth worms. Finally, we have a evidence for a third genomic strategy for MHC function in passerine birds. Discipline
Immunology – T-cells Molecular biology Structural biology Host species
Poultry Wildlife Zoonoses Pathogen
Bacteria Bacteria›Salmonella Parasites Parasites›Eimeria Parasites›Nematodes Viruses Viruses›Calicivirus Viruses›Chicken anaemia virus Viruses›Coronavirus Viruses›Herpesvirus Viruses›Infectious bursal disease virus Viruses›Influenza virus Viruses›Mareks disease virus Viruses›Newcastle disease virus Viruses›Poxviruses Viruses›Retroviruses Stage of vaccine development
Antigen discovery and immunogen design