Welcome to the homepage for the Physiology of Mutagenesis team at University of Cambridge and MRC Cancer Unit. This website is new but the team, led by Dr. Serena Nik-Zainal, has been growing and changing for the better part of a decade.

In 2017, the team found its home at University of Cambridge and is based in the MRC Cancer Unit upon the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. As the team steadily increases in size, so does the diversity of its insights and research initiatives; however a large part of our focus remains on mutational signatures in cancer. While research into the genetics of cancer has historically sought to pinpoint driver mutations (those mutations principally responsible for transitioning a normal cell into a cancerous cell), there is much that can be learnt from discerning patterns amidst the landscape of silent, “passenger” mutations found in cancer. These patterns are referred to as mutational signatures, and our team continues to drive the field of mutational signature research into the future, whether by analysing thousands of patient tumour genomes, or by surveying the vast data obtained from rigorous gene editing and environmental mutagenesis experiments performed in our lab.

While the core of our team is 15 strong (at the time of writing), we owe a huge debt to our global collective of collaborators, friends and colleagues—former and future. We welcome any interest from potential collaborators or future team members—if our work speaks to you, we’d love to hear from you. If you’d just like to learn more about the work we do and the people behind the work, please click around. Our aim is to keep this website updated with all of the goings-on within the team, and we will add more information regarding our research projects and publication history over time.

Thank you for visiting.

Helen Davies