Staff Profile
Dr Tiaan Heunis
Research Associate
- Email: tiaan.heunis@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: 0191 208 8983
- Address: Biosciences Institute
Faculty of Medical Sciences
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE2 4HH
United Kingdom
I conducted my PhD research in the laboratory of Prof. Leon M. T. Dicks in the Department of Microbiology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. My research involved the development of an antimicrobial peptide-eluting nanofiber wound dressing for treating topical infections. I used bacteriocins, from lactic acid bacteria, as alternatives to traditional antibiotics to address the current increase in drug-resistant microbial pathogens, focusing specifically on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The in vivo efficacy of the antimicrobial peptide-eluting nanofiber drug delivery system was shown in a murine infection model. In 2014 I joined the Host-Pathogen Mycobactomics group, headed by Prof. Samantha L. Sampson, in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Stellenbosch University as postdoctoral research fellow. Here I exploited mass spectrometry-based proteomics techniques to gain insight into the proteome of clinical Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates and to understand the interaction of this pathogen with its human host, both in vitro and in vivo. In 2018 I joined Matthias Trost’s group at Newcastle University as research associate to study ubiquitylation in macrophages.
- Kriel NL, Heunis T, Sampson SL, Gey Van Pittius NC, Williams MJ, Warren RM. Identifying nucleic acid-associated proteins in Mycobacterium smegmatis by mass spectrometry-based proteomics. BMC Molecular and Cell Biology 2020, 21, 19.
- Cartmell A, Munoz-Munoz J, Briggs JA, Ndeh DA, Lowe EC, Basle A, Terrapon N, Stott K, Heunis T, Gray J, Yu L, Dupree P, Fernandes PZ, Shah S, Williams SJ, Labourel A, Trost M, Henrissat B, Gilbert HJ. Author Correction: A surface endogalactanase in Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron confers keystone status for arabinogalactan degradation. Nature Microbiology 2019, 4(11), 2021-2023.
- Dean P, Heunis T, Härtlova A, Trost M. Regulation of phagosome functions by post-translational modifications: a new paradigm. Current Opinion in Chemical Biology 2019, 48, 73-80.
- Cartmell A, Munoz-Munoz J, Briggs JA, Ndeh DA, Lowe EC, Basle A, Terrapon N, Stott K, Heunis T, Gray J, Yu L, Dupree P, Fernandes PZ, Shah S, Williams SJ, Labourel A, Trost M, Henrissat B, Gilbert HJ. A surface endogalactanase in Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron confers keystone status forarabinogalactan degradation. Nature Microbiology 2018, 3, 1314-1326.