News

Rory Osborne, a final year Warwick student, was awarded the British Society for Plant Pathology (BSPP) J Colhoun prize at their 2018 presidential conference.

The best poster prize of £100 was awarded to Rory was for his poster "Exploiting effectors of a fungal mutualist to enhance crop production".

Picture: Rob Jackson, Rory and Murray Grant.

Anna Gonzalez Gil, a final year Warwick student, was awarded the British Society for Plant Pathology (BSPP) PH Gregory prize at their 2018 presidential conference.

The prize of £250 was awarded to Anna for the best presentation made by a young scientist who has not previously presented at a paper at a BSPP meeting. Anna's talk was entitled "Chromatin remodelling and its conserved role in plant biotic and abiotic stress responses".

Picture: Dawn Arnold, Anna and Murray Grant.

Ollie Odell, Birmingham 2017 iCASE student, received the Westmere Scholarship for the College of Life and Environmental Sciences for the 2018-19 academic year.

The Westmere Scholars role is to engage with postgraduate researcher communities, initiating and delivering researcher development activities and promoting the postgraduate researcher hub, Westmere.

2016 Warwick student Rachel Clewes had a paper published as a result of her MIBTP away mini-project at the University of Birmingham. The three-month project took place in 2017 under the supervision of Dr Juliet Coates and the paper, entitled Insights into the Evolution of Multicellularity from the Sea Lettuce Genome was published the following year.

Cerys Currie, a final year Warwick MIBTP student, has published a paper as a result of research from her PhD. The paper, entitled, Bub1 is not essential for the checkpoint response to unattached kinetochores in diploid human cells was published in Current Biology in September 2018 and has already received a number of citations.

Charlotte Cooper, a Birmingham third year student, contributed to a paper as part of her lab group and in collaboration with the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle that has just been published in Molecular Systems Biology. The paper is entitled Path-seq identifies an essential mycolate remodeling program for mycobacterial host adaptation.

Charlotte went on to present this work as a poster at the Keystone symposia conference entitled ‘Tuberculosis: mechanisms, pathogenesis and treatment’ in Banff, Canada in January 2019. She attended this event using the MIBTP travel grant.

Two University of Leicester MIBTP students, Kalina Boytcheva and Charlotte Davison were part of a team, Phytocolours, who won the 2018 BBSRC Biotechnology YES competition.

The team's winning idea was reducing pollution from the fashion industry by providing structurally coloured cellulose fibres from microalgae. Their product, Rayonbow™ is used in the manufacture of eco-sustainable textiles to produce fabric that never fades but doesn’t cost the earth.

The final was hosted by the Royal Society in London and the team had ten minutes to present their idea, followed by another 10 minutes to answer questions from the 12 industry judges.

2017 Leicester student Charlie Durant  won another first prize in a poster competition, this time at the International Union for the Study of Social Insects (IUSSI) annual winter meeting held on 20th of December 2018 at the Natural History Museum, London. Congraulations Charlie.

Christian Møller-Olsen, MIBTP 2016 Warwick student, has pubished a paper in Scientific Reports. The paper, entitled Engineered K1F bacteriophages kill intracellular Escherichia coli K1 in human epithelial cells, is Christian's first publication as a result of his main PhD project (under the supervision of Dr Antonia Sagona) and his first, first author paper.

Two University of Leicester MIBTP students, Kalina Boytcheva and Charlotte Davison, have reached the finals of the BBSRCs Biotechnology Young Entrepreneurs scheme; Biotechnology-YES competition.

Kalina, Charlotte and their team (which is comprised of PhD students and postdocs from the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology) will join seven other teams from around the country to compete in the finals of the competition at the Royal Society in December.

In order to win the regional heat of the competition, they had to beat off five other teams by coming up with a plausible (although entirely invented) idea that could be transferred from a research lab to a valuable business. Their idea was to make structurally coloured cellulose for fabric from microalgae. They attended a two day workshop in Manchester with speakers and mentors with expertise in areas such as IP, tech transfer and finance to help them develop their ideas and business plan. On the third day they had to pitch their idea in a 15min presentation to a panel of 4 judges and ask for an “investment” followed by 10mins of questions; similar to “Dragons’ Den”.

Christian Møller-Olsen (Warwick 2016 student), was recently named as co-author on an article pulished in the journal Cell Signalling.

The article, entitled Differential regulation of β2-adrenoceptor and adenosine A2B receptor signalling by GRK and arrestin proteins in arterial smooth muscle, was as a result of Christian's mini-project, undertaken during his training year in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology in Leicester.

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.