News

Nathaniel Davies (2012 cohort) has recently had his second, first author publication - this time in the BMC Evolutionary Biology Journal. The paper is entitled Analysis of 5’ gene regions reveals extraordinary conservation of novel non-coding sequences in a wide range of animals and can be viewed on the Biomedcentral website.

Two MIBTP students are part of a team who have reached the final of the Biotechnology YES competition.

Sian Baily - 2012 cohort, and Matthew Tridgett - 2014 cohort (who are both based at the University of Birmingham), along with their team members Julia Kraemer, Charles Moore-Kelly and Stephen Hall, achieved success in thier workshop and will advance to the finals, taking place in London on 10th December. Sian acted as Managing Director of the team, Matthew, Finance Director.

The Biotechnology Young Entrepreneurs Scheme (Biotechnology YES) is an innovative competition developed to raise awareness of the commercialisation of bioscience ideas among early career researchers. The competition, funded by sponsorship, aims to encourage an entrepreneurial culture for the benefit of the UK economy.

The winners of the Biotechnology YES competition receive £2,500 and an opportunity to attend the Rice Business Plan Competition. For more information on the competition, please see the Biotechnology Yes website.

Nathaniel Davies, of the first MIBTP intake of students, has just had his first author publication in the Oxford Journals Database, The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation. The paper, entitled WaspAtlas: a Nasonia vitripennis gene database and analysis platform, can be viewed on the website

Elise Facer-Childs, 2013 MIBTP student, is first author on a publication in Frontiers in Neurology demontrating that individual's circadian phenotypes are a good predictor for team performance. Reada the article here.

Maura di Martino, a second year MIBTP student, worked with the Global Plant Council for her PIPS. Part of this involved translating plant science lectures for the Gatsby Summer School program as part of their educational outreach. These lectures are on cutting-edge plant science research and available here.

2013 cohort student, Lauren Jones, has just been published as first author for her paper, entitled, Neurochemical measurements in the zebrafish brain.

The paper was published on the online journal, Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience and can be viewed on their website 

Ikhlaas Kasli, a member of the 2013 MIBTP cohort, has been awarded the 'Professor Alice Roberts Award for Public Engagement’. This was based on the public engagement activity which Ikhllas and his team ran on the 20th Feb 2015 at the Birmingham Think Tank. The exhibition was called 'Clever Microbes" and sought to understand the public perception of the role microbes play in everyday life. It also generated awareness about how important these microbes are in society, from being used in our food to the production of therapeutics.

Congratulations to Ikhlaas.

Mike McLeod (2013 cohort) and his team Health Kicks, won the 2015 Post-graduate Enterprise Summer School. The school was commissioned by the West Midlands based social enterprise, Health Exchange, in partnership with the University of Birmingham.

This involved an intensive consultancy project; the aim was to develop an app to improve health, which was then pitched to a panel of judges. The pitch included the value proposition, the market, finance, sales strategy and the app concept. Mike really enjoyed the experience and was working within a great team. He said that he would highly recommend the PESS to any other postgraduate students.

2012 MIBTP student Stephan Grambauer has just had a paper publised in the scientific jounrnal Parasites and Vectors. The paper is entitled Identification of candidate mimicry proteins involved in parasite-driven phenotypic changes.

Stephan Grambauer of the first MIBTP cohort has been awarded a travel grant to give an oral presentation at "8th International Conference on Stickleback Behavior and Evolution" at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA in July 2015.

Harun Rashid of the first MIBTP cohort has been awarded a Vegetable Research Trust (VRT) fund for 2014 / 15 to participate in the International Symposium on Edible Alliaceae in Turkey, 2015.

MIBTP students won three out of the five best poster awards at this year's University of Warwick, School of Life Sciences Student Symposium.

Michael Baker, Harun Rashid and Mussa Quareshy, all from the 2012 cohort each received £25 in prizes.

2012 cohort student Harun Rashid was recenly named first author in a published article based on his MSc work entitled "Low-dose gamma irradiation following hot water immersion of papaya (Carica papaya Linn.) fruits provides additional control of postharvest fungal infection to extend shelf life" The paper was published in the International Journal for Radiation Physics.

On the 20^th February, five members of the School of Chemical Engineering (Ikhlaas Kasli (MIBTP 2013 cohort), Alfred Fernández-Castané, Nurul Asma Hasliza Zulkifly, Charles Moore-Kelly and Stephan Joseph) undertook a day of public engagement at the Thinktank Science Museum in Birmingham.

The exhibition, called ‘Clever Microbes’, sought to understand the public perception of the role microbes play in everyday life. It also generated awareness about how important these microbes are in society, from being used in our food to the production of therapeutics.

Members of the public got involved in experiments growing bakers yeast and capturing the evolved carbon dioxide as the yeast grew and respired, the same process which occurs in bread making. This was then related to the work researched in Chemical Engineering (and also taking place in industry), where these principles are being applied to produce medicines.

The public also saw how these medicines are purified, by running an experiment using thin layer chromatography. They separated out the different coloured dyes from M&Ms using chromatography paper and water.

Finally, there was a microscope, which allowed visitors to see microbes and understand how small they really are.

The exhibit appeared to be enjoyed by the volunteers and museum-visitors alike, with both sets of people engaging in discussion and learning from the interaction.

2013 cohort student, Elise Facer-Childs, has recently had a paper published on www.cell.com 

The paper, entitled The Impact of Circadian Phenotype and Time since Awakening on Diurnal Performance in Athletes has attrached much interest globally. It has been written about in hundreds of articles across the world (including The New York Times, New Scientist, AAAS Eurekalert, The Times, The Telegraph and the NHS website to name a few) and Elise and her co-author Roland Brandstaetter have been invited on to live radio in America, Germany, Singapore, Ireland and here in the UK to discuss the paper.

Elise also spoke about her findings on BBC breakfast; the video for which can be viewed on the BBC News website.