Mike Wallis
Emeritus Professor of Biology

Research

Our laboratory has studied various aspects of the biochemistry and molecular biology of pituitary growth hormone (GH), prolactin and other polypeptide hormones. At present much of our work is concerned with the molecular evolution and comparative genomics of such hormones, which show a number of interesting aspects, including widely divergent evolutionary rates and gene duplications giving rise to subfamilies of related proteins. Current projects include:

• Studies on the evolution of GH in primates, designed to understand more fully the marked differences between human and non-primate GHs and the origin of the family of GH-like placental proteins that occurs in higher primates but not in other mammals.
• Comparative genomics and molecular evolution of peptide hormone precursors.
• Investigation of the co-evolution of insulin and its receptor in primates.