Sir Hugh Reginald Brentnall Pelham, FRS FMedSci[6][7] (born 26 August 1954)[3] is a cell biologist who has contributed to our understanding of the body's response to rises in temperature through the synthesis of heat shock proteins.
More recently, his research investigates how proteins are modified and sorted to their correct places within cells and aims to find ways of blocking these processes.
[7][10][11][12][13] Pelham has been a visiting professor at the University of Zurich and held many posts at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he succeeded Richard Henderson to become the LMB's Director in 2006.
He has shown that this sequence is the binding site for a transcription factor which is modified by heat shock, thus establishing the basic mechanism of induction of these genes.
This led to his discovery that a C-terminal amino acid sequence is a novel sorting signal, preventing proteins from being exported from the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum.