The lab also has a long-term industry collaboration with Unilever, to help them understand how bacteria in the underarm produce body odour (BO). This has been a decade of fascinating work, where we have made some useful discoveries and continue to work with our industry partners taking our research deeper into understanding the skin microbiome and its function more generally.

Early days - 2008-2015 The collaboration started when at a BBSRC organised grant-holders meeting in Manchester in 2008 Gavin got talking to Patrick Warren, an expert in Unilever on metabolic modelling, which was an approach we were using at that time to understand bacterial symbionts on insects (see that theme). Later we organised an international workshop on metabolic modelling in York and Patrick suggested I talk to his colleague Gordon James at their Colworth site and Gavin duly visited and discovered they were interested in transporters. We quickly wrote a BBSRC iCASE bid (these were stand-alone studentships at the time and not linked to DTPs/CTPs like now) and we were successful, with Daniel Bawdon being the student appointed on the project.

Dan was then the first 'BO' student in the lab and quickly showed that, when using physiological odour precursors, it looked like some species of coagulase negative Staphylococci (CoNS) were important players in the production of thioalcohol-based body odour. We published our first paper, based on Dan's work in FEMS Microbiology Letters in 2015. This was with 'Gordy' and his amazing research associate Diana Cox and we worked up the HPLC assay for thioalcohols with David Ashford in the Biology Technology Facility in York. We then wrote our first grant to BBSRC to continue this work to try and discover the transporter for the BO precursors, which is a dipeptide-linked molecule. Our IPA grant to BBSRC was not funded, but we quickly rejigged it for the LINK route with BBSRC and were super excited to get this funded. Dan had taken a job with a biotech firm on Teesside, so we needed to appoint a new PDRA and team for the project.

Funding and discovery & structural characterisation of the precursor transporter
In the period that the grant was being prepared, we also obtained some Proof of Concept funding with CBMNet, one of the BBSRC Networks in Industrial Biotechnology, which was a new collaboration with Prof. Simon Newstead at Oxford University. In this relatively short project, following some preliminary data from Dan that a peptide transporter was important for precursor uptake, Gurdeep Minhas in Simon's lab managed to get some preliminary crystal data for the POT transporter from our species of Staphylococcus that made the most BO - namely S. hominis
In the period that the grant was being prepared, we also obtained some Proof of Concept funding with CBMNet, one of the BBSRC Networks in Industrial Biotechnology, which was a new collaboration with Prof. Simon Newstead at Oxford University. In this relatively short project, following some preliminary data from Dan that a peptide transporter was important for precursor uptake, Gurdeep Minhas in Simon's lab managed to get some preliminary crystal data for the POT transporter from our species of Staphylococcus that made the most BO - namely S. hominis

Elucidation the pathways to thioalcohol production in Staphylococci -
With the new Team BO in place, led by Dr. Michelle Rudden, with research associate Reyme Herman and later new PhD student Matt Rose, we completed the work with the Oxford team and published the structure of the uptake system with the odour precursor bound in eLife (Minhas, Bawdon et al., 2018).
At the same time Dan and I were named on a patent with Unilever on strategies targeting the transporter to reduce BO in humans.
Reyme and Matt then both worked on the enzymes that cleave the odour precursors inside the cell. For the thioalcohols we discovered that only a limited number of CoNS could produce high levels of 3M3SH and we were able to find a unique enzyme, which we dubbed the BO lyase, which was present in a small monophyletic group of CoNS, including the common skin commensal Staphylococcus hominis.
With the new Team BO in place, led by Dr. Michelle Rudden, with research associate Reyme Herman and later new PhD student Matt Rose, we completed the work with the Oxford team and published the structure of the uptake system with the odour precursor bound in eLife (Minhas, Bawdon et al., 2018).
At the same time Dan and I were named on a patent with Unilever on strategies targeting the transporter to reduce BO in humans.
Reyme and Matt then both worked on the enzymes that cleave the odour precursors inside the cell. For the thioalcohols we discovered that only a limited number of CoNS could produce high levels of 3M3SH and we were able to find a unique enzyme, which we dubbed the BO lyase, which was present in a small monophyletic group of CoNS, including the common skin commensal Staphylococcus hominis.

Reyme and Michelle, with our collaborator Prof. Tony Wilkinson in the York Structural Biology Laboratory, solved the structure of the BO lyase and was able to demonstrate biochemically that this enzyme, a CS-lyase family enzyme, had evolved specificity for using odour precursors. As this clade of CoNS separated about 200 million years ago, we proposed that the ability to cleave BO precursors predated the split of man from higher apes. This was published in 2020 in a paper (Rudden, Herman, Rose, et al., 2020) which attracted a lot of press attention (see below)
Ongoing research aims to identify the peptidase step which released glycine for the bacteria to eat and the enzymes required for cleavage of glutamine from precursors of volatile fatty acids.
Ongoing research aims to identify the peptidase step which released glycine for the bacteria to eat and the enzymes required for cleavage of glutamine from precursors of volatile fatty acids.

The end of an era
After over a decade of high productive and enjoyable collaboration with Gordon James at Colworth, he announced his retirement at the end of 2022 and we invited him to York for a final celebration of our work, while we now transition from our work on BO exclusively to a broader considering of the axilla microbiome and the role of multiple bacteria working together to produce BO but also to protect the skin against other pathogens, with new partners Dr. Barry Murphy and Dr. Rob Cornmell at Unilever at Port Sunlight on the Wirral.
Also, having failed to win any additional grant funding from BBSRC (after 2 attempts), Michelle had to look for a new position, but at the same time my excellent colleague Prof. Marjan van der Woude introduced us to some scientists in Hull...
After over a decade of high productive and enjoyable collaboration with Gordon James at Colworth, he announced his retirement at the end of 2022 and we invited him to York for a final celebration of our work, while we now transition from our work on BO exclusively to a broader considering of the axilla microbiome and the role of multiple bacteria working together to produce BO but also to protect the skin against other pathogens, with new partners Dr. Barry Murphy and Dr. Rob Cornmell at Unilever at Port Sunlight on the Wirral.
Also, having failed to win any additional grant funding from BBSRC (after 2 attempts), Michelle had to look for a new position, but at the same time my excellent colleague Prof. Marjan van der Woude introduced us to some scientists in Hull...

New opportunities to understand the microbes on the skin.
While Michelle had started working more generally on the function of S. hominis there was an opportunity to work with Prof. Matthew Hardman and Dr. Holly Wilkinson in HYMS in Hull who are experts in wound healing, but use Staphylococci aureus as the main infective agent for their wound model using human skin. Michelle's move to Hull started a new Hull-York collaboration and new PhD student Danos Papapostolou starte d in 2023 to study the diversity of S. aureus from wounds.
Helping build these new research directions was the formation of the new Skin Research Centre (SRC) launched by the Hull-York Medical School (HYMS) which brings together a much larger groups of diverse scientists interest in skin function in health and disease.
While Michelle had started working more generally on the function of S. hominis there was an opportunity to work with Prof. Matthew Hardman and Dr. Holly Wilkinson in HYMS in Hull who are experts in wound healing, but use Staphylococci aureus as the main infective agent for their wound model using human skin. Michelle's move to Hull started a new Hull-York collaboration and new PhD student Danos Papapostolou starte d in 2023 to study the diversity of S. aureus from wounds.
Helping build these new research directions was the formation of the new Skin Research Centre (SRC) launched by the Hull-York Medical School (HYMS) which brings together a much larger groups of diverse scientists interest in skin function in health and disease.