Monthly Seminar Program
Guest Speakers:
Dr. Ian Hastings
Phd Speakers:
Lucienne Otten
Christine Hicks
Robert Lockley
3/5/2013
Seminar program
Time
13:00-14:00
Session
Lunch
Location
Common room
14:00-15:00
Invited guest speaker
MOAC Seminar room
15:00-15:15
Tea and co↵ee break
Common room
15:15-16:15
3 Phd Presentations
Phd presentations consist 15 minute talks (including questions) audience rotates between
three rooms
Lucienne Otten
Christine Hicks
Robert Lockley
MOAC Seminar Room
WSB 32
WSB 336
16:15-16:20
Break
Common room
16:20-16:45
Science Quiz
MOAC Seminar room
16:45 onwards
Wine and Cheese
Common room
1
Presentation Description
Guest Speaker Session
Developing pharmacological modelling to simulate malaria drug
treatment outcome.
Modelling the spread of drug resistance in malaria usually assumes a
mutation encodes resistance and then tracks this allele frequency using a
population genetic approach. This generates useful qualitative results capable of guiding policy, for example demonstrating the superiority of combination therapies. In practice drug sensitivity/resistance is rarely a strictly
dichotomous trait: many sensitive infections can survive treatment if the
patient is poorly compliant with the drug regimen, and many resistant infections are cleared by high drug levels aided by host immunity. I shall
describe our recent work building models of drug resistance based on pharmacological PK/PD modelling to develop a more sophisticated quantitative
understanding of drug treatment and resistance.
Phd Session 1:
Lucienne Otten
Predicting pathogenicity based on carbohydrate adhesion
Protein-carbohydrate interactions form a crucial mechanism for mediating many biological processes including host-pathogen interactions. The
aim of my project is to look at di↵erences in protein-carbohydrate adhesion
patterns between pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains of bacteria using
carbohydrate microarrays. I will be focussing my work on Mycobacterium
tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis. Approximately a third of the worlds
population is infected by M. tuberculosis and as a consequence, over 1 million people died in 2011. This disease is becoming increasingly difficult to
treat due to emergence of multi drug resistant, extensively drug resistant and
most recently totally drug resistant strains. Genome analysis of these bacteria has revealed that antibiotic resistance is not always controlled by the
genome and as such, protein-carbohydrate adhesion patterns are a potential
mechanism through which resistance could be controlled. They also play
a key role in controlling bacterial pathogenicity so identification of important adhesion factors could reveal potential drug targets for anti-adhesion
therapy.
The first step on my project is the development of a technique that allows
surface immobilisation of unmodified carbohydrates in order to be able to
create the microarrays that will be used for further analysis. My talk will
focus on the method I have currently developed and my future work.
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Phd Session 2:
Christine Hicks
Systems analysis of stress tolerance in Brassica: Translations from
Arabidopsis
Abiotic or biotic stresses are a major cause of reduced yield and quality
in crops worldwide. The e↵ects can be reduced by a high input of resources,
such as irrigation and the application of pesticides and fertilizers. However,
this method of agriculture is unsustainable, especially taking into account
the added pressures of the increasing global population, variable environmental conditions and reduced availability of resource. Crops must be grown
more sustainably without large inputs in a more intensive manner, known
as sustainable intensification. It is important to understand the genes that
are key in the stress response so that breeders can develop robust, stress
resilient varieties.
Here, a systems biology approach will be taken to analyse changes in
the transcriptome of Brassica oleracea under various stress conditions using
RNA-seq and microarray technologies. Mathematical models will be applied
to the non-model, commercially grown organism, with the aim of inferring
gene network models of stress response pathways and identifying key regulatory genes as potential targets for plant breeding. There will also be the
opportunity to compare the networks with those developed in the closely
related model organism Arabidopsis thaliana to study the e↵ects of gene
diversification during evolution.
Phd Session 3:
Robert Lockley
Fluorescence Imaging of Motility in Dictyostelium discoideum
The single celled amoeba Dictyostelium is highly motile organism, using
chemotactic signals to hunt for food and to aggregate during development.
This makes it an attractive organism in which to study cell motility, an important process involved in development, immune response and cancer. The
advent of high quality fluorescence imaging now provides us with time course
data detailing the positions of fluorescently tagged molecules inside living
cells. This can be applied to images of motile cells, providing a correlation
between dynamics of local membrane movement with the local concentration of membrane proteins. I will outline my current work obtaining and
analysing time course images of Dictyostelium, both during random motility and under exposure to external signals. I will also present work on the
fitting of cell polarity models to repolarisation data.
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