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.

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.”