MIBTP won big at the School of Life Sciences student symposium this year:

Xue Jiang Memorial Prize - Best Seminar Presentation voted by staff – wins £200

• Beth Richmond

Xue Jiang Memorial Prize - Best Poster voted by staff – wins £125

• Rhys Evans

Top 5 seminars (in no order) - win £50 each

• Helen Wilkinson
• Anjana Radhakrishnan

Top 5 Posters (in no order - win £25 each

• Rebecca Quinn
• Tom MacCreath
• Isabel Aberdeen
• Rhiannon Lyon

Well done all.

Third year Warwick student Thomas MacCreath was awarded Best Poster Presentation Prize from Access Microbiology at the recent Microbiology Society annual conference in Belfast. Congratulations Thomas.

Recent MIBTP graduate Charlotte Cooper published a paper on her PhD research; MadR mediates acyl CoA-dependent regulation of mycolic acid desaturation in mycobacteria’ in PNAS (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2111059119). The work has implications for understanding the strategies of cell wall remodelling for pathogenesis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and response to stress in mycobacteria across various environments ranging from soil to an intracellular niche in infected macrophages.

Birmingham MIBTP student Kish Adoni has published a paper.

We have developed a new proteomics method that enriches for multiple PTM containing peptides by 6-fold using FAIMS ion mobility. Excitingly, ~40% of our multi-PTM identifications have not previously been reported.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jproteome.1c00721

Final year student Niamh and third year student Jenny, both MIBTP Warwick students, have published a paper Transcriptome Analysis of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilm Infection in an Ex Vivo Pig Model of the Cystic Fibrosis Lung, in ASM journalsLink opens in a new window.

On 21st January 2022, second year Birmingham student Jessica Chadwick (as part of a team made up of students and researchers from the universities of Birmingham, Nottingham and Keele), won the Environment YES21 prize.

The YES21 competition is a scheme for early career researchers to increase their awareness of research commercialisation.

The team's business concept, called RoboCrop, is a remote drone sensing operation that would allow early detection of pest and pathogen outbreaks using three different sensors (e-nose, IR and chlorophyll fluorescence). This would reduce pesticide inputs into fields, limiting environmental impacts and reducing costs for farmers. The team won a share of a £15k prize fund.

On their win, the team said:

"We are so proud of winning Environment YES21. Our multi-university team had to work virtually and didn’t know each other beforehand, despite this, we created a successful team. Syngenta’s workshop was uniquely rewarding with fantastic mentorship throughout. We have broadened our skill set in ways we hadn’t even considered before the competition. An amazing opportunity and having finally met in-person after the final, winning was the cherry on top."

Congratulations to Jess and the team.

Final year Warwick student Glen has published a paper in the journal, Transboundary and Emerging Diseases. The paper is entitled A model exploration of carrier and movement transmission as potential explanatory causes for the persistence of foot-and-mouth disease in endemic region and can be viewed online now.

Second year Birmingham CASE student Jessica Chadwick is part of a team who has made the final of this year's YES competition.

Final year Warwick iCASE student Alex has been accepted as a participant, with hopes of delivering a presentation, at the Global Young Scientists Summit (GYSS 2022), which takes place 17-21 January 2022.

He is also an invited speaker for The Training Partnership on their A-level Chemistry on action days in Manchester, Warwick and London to ~1500 A-level students.

Final year Warwick Chemistry student Alex Baker has recently published 3 papers, as follows:

COVID 19 detection device https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.1c01470

All glycan lateral flow device https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adhm.202101784

Protein-free lateral flow device https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acspolymersau.1c00032

Warwick final year student, Emily Skates, has published a paper, entitled Thioflavin T indicates membrane potential in mammalian cells and can affect it in a blue light dependent manner.

2019 Warwick CASE student Huba Marton has had his first (first author) paper published. The paper, entitled Polymer-Mediated Cryopreservation of Bacteriophage, was published by ACS Publications.

Third year Birmingham student Niamh Eastwood has published her first first-author paper. The paper, entitled "The Time Machine framework: monitoring and prediction of biodiversity loss', proposes the use of AI to forecast biodiversity change and can be viewed here https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.09.008

MIBTP students across the cohorts at Warwick, won prizes at this year's School of Life Sciences student symposium. The MIBTP winners were:

Best Seminar Presentation in memory of Xue Jiang

• Holly Shropshire

Following top 5 Posters (in no order)

• Matt Harwood
• Anjana Radhakrishnan
• Beth Richmond
• Jenny Littler
• Helen Wilkinson

Top 5 Seminar Presentations (in no order)

• Niamh Harrington
• Jeff Cheng
• Rohini Ajaykumar

Dr Robyn Wright, a former MIBTP Warwick student was recently interviewed for an article in The Guardian. Entitled ‘Welcome to the plastisphere: the synthetic ecosystem evolving at sea; the article describes a new ecosystem of free flowing organisms inhabiting microplastics. The article also highlights Robyn’s latest publication in Microbiome on the analysis of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) degradation by marine bacteria.