visit
our
w e bs i t e
w w w . k e nt . a c . uk / b i o
MSc: Science
Communication and Society
It was a successful year for our new MSc Science, Communication and Society. Running
for the second year, we had a very good set of
results: of the 11 students, 10 passed, seven
with merit and two with distinction.
The external examiner was very happy with
the programme, commenting in particular on
the effective mix of scientific and historical content, the skills developed, the high quality of
student work and the diversity of assessment.
This included the residency, in which students
were hosted in research laboratories within the
School which gave the students a real insight
of science at work. He was also impressed
with research projects that were associated
with external stakeholders. One of the projects
was in association with the Institute of Cancer
Research “Everyman” Campaign, which targets public awareness of male cancers.
Recruitment remains buoyant, with a similar
number of students registered this year.
I
N OVE M B ER
2010
I
Grants Awarded
September 2010 Dr Campbell Gourlay, £1,000 British Council for a
project entitled ‘Investigating the role of Cofilin in Mitrochondrial Permeabilisation and Apoptosis’
October 2010 Dr Dan Mulvihill, Cairn Research Ltd CASE award
£75,000 ‘Development of an in-vivo bio-imaging system to ‘facilitate
real-time cytoskeleton studies’
October 2010 Professor Darren Griffin, Digital Scientific UK Ltd CASE
award £90,000 ‘Studies of identification and isolation of foetal nucleic
acids from the plasma of pregnant women’
November 2010 Dr Anthony Baines, Pfizer, BBSRC Industrial CASE
award £75,000, ‘Investigating the relationship between the cellular
substratum and the pain-related phenotype of dorsal root ganglia’
November 2010 Dr Richard Williamson, Wellcome Trust £240,000
‘Conformational, dynamic and ligand-binding properties or protein
disulphide-isomerase: studies with site-specific NMR and fluorescent
probes’
November 2010 Dr Peter Nicholls, travel grant £1,000, Leukaemia
and Lymphoma Research
Lab Focus Howard lab
This year has been exceptionally busy and exciting in the Howard lab.
September 1-3 also saw the annual meeting of the Collaborative
May began with the award of £456,741 from The Wellcome Trust to
Computing Project for NMR (CCPN) at Ambleside, Cumbria,
Upgrade the NMR spectrometer and saw Mark and NMR Technical
which is a BBSRC funded project for the UK. Mark is both
Officer, Michelle Rowe, travel to Fällanden (Nr. Zürich, Switzerland)
and Yarnton (Oxfordshire, UK) for spectrometer demonstrations.
Our choice, from Bruker UK, includes a CryoProbe that allows us to
work with much lower sample concentrations as well increasing our
functionality to include studies of nucleic acids. The spectrometer
Executive Chairperson and member of the International Scientific
Advisory Board for the CCPN. He hosted and helped organise
the meeting where PhD Students Jane Wagstaff, Denisa Doko
and Samantha Taylor from both Howard and Williamson labs
arrives spring 2011 as it is custom built to our requirements. We
presented posters.
Jane has also had a busy summer with
expect to be fully operational by early summer 2011 when once
two accepted publications and submission of her PhD thesis.
again the School will have a state-of-the-art NMR spectrometer.
School of Biosciences • University of Kent • Giles Lane • Canterbury • Kent CT2 7NJ • tel 01227 824690
visit
our
w e bs i t e
w w w . k e nt . a c . uk / b i o
I
N OVE M B ER
Stacey Symposium and Building Dedication
Friday September 17th 2010 was a very
important day in the history of the School
of Biosciences with the naming of the
Stacey Building and the running of what we
hope will be the first of an annual ‘Stacey
Symposium’. The event brought together a
number of former colleagues from across
the UK to celebrate the renaming of the
building in honour of the founding Director of
the School, Professor Ken Stacey who sadly
passed away earlier this year. We were also
delighted that several generations of the
Stacey family were able to attend including
Ken’s wife Rosalie as well a number of
former staff, students and friends including
Peter Barth, Glyn Tonge, Judy Hardy, Ray
Newsam, Tony Cooke, Aj Sharman, Alf
Edginton, Jo Connor and Bob Hudson.
hard science and many enjoyed hearing the
accounts of the ‘early days’ of the School.
Among the speakers were Keith Gull, Chris
Knowles, Robert Freedman, Steve Oliver
and George Salmond all of whom had stories
to tell of the (then) Biological Laboratory and
Ken’s influence on their careers...as well
as some of the excellent science they have
been doing since they left Canterbury.
The School now intends to hold an annual
one day symposium in September that
we will call the ‘Stacey Symposium’. The
speakers will be invited from our alumni and
will highlight how successful many of our
students, researchers and academic staff
have been in both laboratory-based science
but also in other areas.
The main event of the day was the unveiling of
a commemorative plaque by the University’s
Vice-Chancellor Dame Julia Goodfellow.
Around the unveiling we had a very busy
day with a number of former colleagues – all
hired by Ken – giving talks. The talks were a
delightful mixture of reminiscence and
Calling Kent Biosciences Alumni
Following the success of the Stacey Symposium in renewing links with former Kent Bioscientists, the School
is beginning to assemble a database of our alumni – be they students, researchers or academic staff. We
aim to keep all who have passed through these doors at some point in their career, informed of activities
in the School. All alumni will be sent an e-copy of this newsletter and will be invited to attend the annual
Stacey Symposium (see separate story). If you know of the whereabouts (and email address if known)
of any former students, postdocs, technicians or staff, please pass information to Sue Davies (email:
S.J.Davies@kent.ac.uk)
The Annual Wain Medal Lecture will take place on Friday 19 November 2010 at
5pm in Woolf Lecture Theatre. The awardee is Professor Frank Sargent from
the University of Dundee
2010
I
News and events
Is it a bird? Is it a
plane?......No! It’s a
postgrad on a zip line!
Jumping out of trees at dizzying heights, firing arrows with
Rambo-like accuracy and scaling walls with the professionalism of wolf from gladiators, this
year’s team building trip to Swattenden activity centre found new
post grads trying out all kinds
of dare devil activities including
wall climbing, archery, orienteering, zip lining and night walking.
A great time was had by all and
through a shared fear of wobbly
ladders, new friendships were
formed. Everyone took part and
pushed themselves above and
beyond personal comfort zones
with the group clearly leaving
an impression on Swattenden
instructors who commented on
how enjoyable it was to work
with people with such a “give it a
go” attitude.
It’s safe to say the action hero
potential in this year’s new PhD
students should not be underestimated!
Pictured up a 30ft pole are Dan,
Woody, Deborah and Kara
visit
our
w e bs i t e
w w w . k e nt . a c . uk / b i o
Microscopy Workshop
I
N OVE M B ER
2010
I
New Admin Office Move
At the beginning of term, the administration
office moved into a new office in room B201
(at the top of the stairs in the Stacey Building).
The central location gives a more friendly,
professional welcome to students, staff and
visitors to the school, and it is hoped that
the hatch will ultimately become a ‘one-stopshop’ for our undergraduate students.
Paris to USA
The microscopy workshop was conceptualised in 2008, born from a challenge
issued by Richard Williamson and Gary Robinson. Postgraduates were tasked
with the design and delivery of an Outreach event which incorporated many
aspects of microscopy. The intention was to raise understanding of fundamental
ideas such as magnification, and to foster awareness of organisms too small for
the naked eye see in detail.
The event is designed as a one day interactive session where pupils from local
schools can use the departmental facilities to examine a variety of insect, algae and
plant specimens using a range of devices with increasing levels of magnification,
in keeping with the theme of size.
Later, the pupils tour the electron microscope facility and participate in an interactive
quiz before being introduced to our portable, hand-held USB microscopes.
Children are shown how to take amazing images with these microscopes, and
schools may sign them out so that they can take their own images, then upload
them to a dedicated website for everyone to view. We have a photo gallery and
a collection of learning resources: http://www.kent.ac.uk/bio/study/Outreach/
microscopy/index.html.
Anthony Baines has been on his travels again.
Last month he gave the opening plenary lecture
at an International Symposium on Red Cell Antigens in Paris (September 15-17 2010). This
month he travelled to Cincinnati, Ohio, to give an
invited presentation at the 2010 Red Cell Conference (October 8-9). This is the leading specialist annual conference on red blood cells and
this year was, as usual, extremely good, with
presentations from groups from Europe and Asia
as well as the US. Anthony was actually the only
UK-based speaker.
One of the fascinating aspects of Cincinnati is
that it sits on the Ohio River which was the border between the North and the Slave States in
the time up to and during the Civil War. Several
beautiful old buildings on the South bank (Kentucky side) have secret rooms where slaves escaping from the South through the Underground
Railroad were hidden prior to fording the river to
freedom under cover of darkness
The microscopy workshop is always looking for more volunteers to help sustain the
high standard of fun and innovative teaching, so if you would like to get involved
then contact Steffi at sjm59@kent.ac.uk.
On Thursday 21 October staff and postgraduates came together for a tea party to welcome new students to the school. Lab members and students baked cakes and right are
some of the delights that were on offer.
our
w e bs i t e
w w w . k e nt . a c . uk / b i o
Cold Harbor Spring Meeting
In September Claudia Solscheid from the von der Haar/Tuite
lab flew across the Atlantic to attend the Cold Spring Harbor
meeting on Translational Control. At the meeting Claudia
presented a poster on “The regulation of accuracy during
eukaryotic mRNA decoding”. The poster described her
recent findings on the mechanisms by which environmental
conditions and mutants in various cellular processes affect
translational accuracy in yeast.
NMIC Group
Mohammad-Reza Nasiri-Avanaki, PhD student in neurosciences and medical image computing (NMIC) group and applied
optics group (AOG) has been awarded € 500 as scholarship
by European Microscopy Society (EMS) due to his success in
Microscience 2010 by winning the best poster prize. He’ll attend Photonics West, the largest conference in optics, being
held 22-27 January 2011 in California, USA. His paper entitled
“Comparative assessment of three algorithms to control a deformable mirror for an adaptive optics system with no wave front sensor” was accepted
for oral presentation.
Mohammad was also one of the lucky applicants for the 2010 Kent Sport
Scholarship scheme with 56 scholars receiving scholarships ranging from
£300 - £2000 in 21 different sports including: trampolining, shooting, boxing, duathlon and wheelchair basketball.
I
N OVE M B ER
2010
I
Recent Publications
Foster, H.A., Sturmey, R.G., Stokes, P.J.,
Leese, H.J., Bridger, J.M. & Griffin, D.K.
(2010) Fluoresence in situ hybridization on
early porcine embryos. In: Fluorescence in
situ hybridization (FISH) protocols and applications (Ed. Joanne M. Bridger and Emanuela V. Volpi). Methods in Molecular Biology,
659, 427-436
Abdel-Mageed, W.M., Milne, B.F., Wagner,
M., Schumacher, M., Sandor, P., Pathomaree, W., Goodfellow, M., Bull, A.T., Horikoshi, K., Ebel, R., Diederich, M., Fiedler, H.-P.
& Jaspars, M. (2010) Dermacozines, a new
phenazine family from deep-sea dermacocci
isolated from a Mariana Trench sediment.
Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, 8, 23522362.
Adamek, N., Lieto-Trivedi, A., Geeves, M.A.
& Coluccio, L.M. (2010) Modification of loop
1 affects the nucleotide binding properties of
Myo1c, the adaptation motor in the inner ear.
Biochemistry, 49, 958-971.
Allen, M.J. & Godenschwege, T.A (2010) Electrophysiological rcorings from the Drosophila
giant fiber system. In: Drosophila neurobiology: a laboratory manual. (Ed. Zhang, B. &
Freeman, M.R.). CSH Press, Chapter 13, pp.
215-224. ISBN: 978-087969905-5
Baines, A.J. (2010) Evolution of the spectrinbased membrane skeleton. Transfusion clinique et biologique, 17, 95-103.
Piletska, E.V., Stavroulakis, G., Karim, K.,
Whitcombe, M.J., Chianella, I., Sharma, A.,
Eboigbodin,K.E., Robinson, G.K. & Piletsky,
S.A. (2010) Attenuation of Vibrio fischeri quorum sensing using rationally designed polymers. Biomacromolecules, 11, 975-980.
Naeimi, W.R. and Tuite, M.F. (2010) Fungal
prions as epigenetic determinants. The Biochemist 32, 30-33.
Merritt, G.H., Naemi, W.R., Mugnier, P.,
Webb, H.M., Tuite, M.F. & von der Haar, T.
(2010) Decoding accuracy in eRF1 mutants
and its correlation with pleiotropic quantitative
traits in yeast. Nucleic Acids Research, 38,
5479-5492.
Wang, H., Liu, C., Debnath, G., Baines, A.J.,
Conboy, J.G., Mohandas, N. & An, X. (2010)
Comprehensive characterization of expression patterns of protein 4.1 family members
in mouse adrenal gland: implications for functions. Histochemistry and Cell Biology, 134,
411-420
Wagstaff, J.L., Vallath, S., Marshall, J.F., Williamson, R.A. & Howard, M.J. (2010) Twodimensional heteronuclear saturation transfer difference NMR reveals detailed integrin
αvβ6 protein-peptide interactions. Chemical
Communication, 46, 7533-7535
​
Bull, A.T. (2010) The renaissance of continuous culture in the post-genomics age. Journal
of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology,
37: 993-1021.
Handyside, A.H., Harton, G.L., Mariani, B.,
Thornhill, A.R., Affara, N., Shaw, M.-A. & Griffin, D.K. (2010) Karyomapping: a universal
method for genome wide analysis of genetic
disease based on mapping crossovers between parental haplotypes. Journal of Medical Genetics, 47, 651-658.
Lab Focus Mulvihill lab
Following the successful pilot event with Hextable School and Marlowe Academy
(Ramsgate), the postgraduates involved in the program hope to further develop
the microscopy workshop for 2010 and make it an annual event.
Postgraduate Tea Party
visit
IT Corner
eType
Are you looking to speed up your typing? eType
is an application that auto-completes the words
as you type. eType works with almost every program, browser and Web site, including Microsoft
Word, Outlook, Gmail, ICQ, Windows Messenger, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to name a
few www.etype.com
Over the last few months the Mulvihill lab have been spending a considerable proportion of their
time developing their rapid multi-dimension live cell imaging system. The lab’s research interests
focus upon the study of molecular motors within yeast, and trying to understand how the movement
of these myosins is regulated throughout the cell. Current research questions demand that the
lab’s imaging system allow researchers the ability to simultaneously follow the movements of
multiple proteins throughout the whole cell in the millisecond timescale. This has required the
lab to upgrade the system significantly, which has all been undertaken with the help of Cairn
Research, a local fluorescence-imaging specialist with whom the lab have an enjoyable and exciting collaboration. Cairn also
sponsor (together with the BBSRC) the research of Matt Johnson, who recently embarked on a PhD in the lab. These upgrades,
together with the recent purchase of a new Hammamtsu C-MOS camera permits the lab to image cells within the sub-millisecond
time-scale, and for the time allows the movement of all myosins within a single cell type to be followed at the same time.
Over the summer the lab has also had the opportunity to present their recent findings at a number of meetings through the UK
and Europe. These include meetings in Oxford, Paris and Barcelona. While in Spain Dan also took the opportunity to catch up
with Rebeca, an ex- research fellow in the lab (2006 - 2008) who now lives in Madrid where she is a researcher in the labs of the
pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly. She has settled down nicely to life back in Spain, and sends her best wishes to her friends
at this school.