Shaun Scaramuzza , a Birmingham MIBTP CASE student, won a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship to take part in their Summer Program between June and August 2018. Shaun undertook his placement in the Molecular Cell Engineering Lab, led by Prof. Masato Kanemaki, at the National Institute of Genetics in Japan. The aim of his project was to learn / utilise the Auxin-Inducible Degradation system developed by Prof. Kanemaki’s group to degrade key ubiquitin ligases involved in the replisome disassembly process, and determine the consequences of this depletion.

2017 Leicester student Charlie Durant has been selected to visit the Department of Biological Sciences at Nara Women's University in Japan in March 2019 as part of an exchange with the University of Leicester. She will spend a week in Nara visiting the research laboratories, the university and the city.

Charlie Durant's (Leicester MIBTP 2017 student) poster A first glimpse of the ant gut “phageome” won first prize in the 2018 Insect Genomics meeting hosted by the Royal Entomological Society at the University of Leicester. The prize for this award was £100.

Birmingham 2015 student Alice Darbyshire, in collaboration with her lab and the INRA in France has recently had a paper published based on their work on a novel chromosome axis associated protein. The paper, entitled Identification of ASYNAPTIC4, a component of the meiotic chromosome axis can be found on the NCBI website.

Bhavini Patel, Warwick 2016 MIBTP student, is joint first author on a paper recently published in the journal, Molecular Neurobiology. The paper, entitled "The Parkinson’s Disease-Linked Protein DJ-1 Associates with Cytoplasmic mRNP Granules During Stress and Neurodegeneration" was as a result of the work undertaken during Bhavini's mini-project at the University of Leicester during her training year.

Charlotte Cooper, MIBTP Birmingham 2016 student, has published a paper in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy as a result of the work undertaken during her PIPS placement during her training year. The paper is entitled A survey of practice and opinions on the use of topical antibiotics to prevent surgical site infection: more confusion than consensus.

Charlotte was also invited to give two talks as a result of this work; the first was at the Federation of Infection Society (FIS) conference Birmingham, December 2017 and the title of the talk was, “The use of topical antibiotics for the prevention of surgical site infection: a survey of practice and opinions.”

The second talk was entitled “The use of topical antibiotics to prevent SSI – a review of the evidence" and this was given at the European Wound Management Association (EWMA) conference Krakow, May 2018.

Liam Walker, Warwick 2015 student, has recently had the following publications:

• Root architecture shaping by the environment is orchestrated by dynamic gene expression in space and time, Plant Cell (first author)

• Histological Profiling Over Time to Optimize Root Cell Type-Specific Reporter Lines for Cell Sorting, Root Development

Final year Warwick Student Henry is first author on a paper published in Seminars in cell & developmental biology (Vol. 70, pp. 122-129). Academic Press. The paper is entitled Sex-specific lifespan and its evolution in nematodes.

Maria Theresa, Birmingham 2015 student, received a commendation at the 2018 Institute Cancer & Genomic Sciences PGR Festival on her presentation “Investigating the role of the APC/C subunit Apc5 in mitosis.”

Final year Warwick student Mingkee was awarded a travel grant to attend the 41st New Phytologist Symposium ‘Plant sciences for the future’ which was held at Présidence de l’Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France, 11–13 April 2018. At the symposium, Mingkee presented a poster abstract entitled Are nodule specific genes NCRs under the regulatory control of ancient protein family?

Kate Woolley-Allen, Warwick 2015 student, has had a paper published in the Root Journal. The paper is entitled Histological Profiling Over Time to Optimize Root Cell Type-Specific Reporter Lines for Cell Sorting.

Lauren Lansdowne, Leicester 2016 iCASE student, was named joint first author on a paper published in The Faseb Journal. The paper was as a result of her mini-project at the University of Warwick during her training year and is entitled Analysis of chromatin accessibility in decidualizing human endometrial stromal cells.

Luca Illing, Warwick third year MIBTP student, won one of the top four poster prizes at the 2018 Warwick School of Life Sciences PGR Seminar. This awarded him a prize of £25.

Matthew, who is a Birmingham final year MIBTP student, was first author on two journals which have recently been published, as follows:

• Topological analysis of multicellular complexity in the plant hypocotyl, eLife
• Network-based approaches to quantify multicellular development, Journal of the Royal Society Interface