Professor Michael Grant is Professor of Medical Biochemistry and Chairman of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Matrix Research at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Manchester. He has made a long series of important contributions to research in connective tissue biochemistry, especially in relation to the collagen family of extracellular matrix proteins. Amongst his contributions he discovered and characterised type X collagen and showed that mutations in the gene encoding collagen X give rise to a type of metaphyseal chondrodysplasia.