News

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.

Final year Birmingham MIBTP student Ilyas Alav is named first-author on a paper published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy: Interchangeability of periplasmic adaptor proteins AcrA and AcrE in forming functional efflux pumps with AcrD in Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium

Final year MIBTP Birmingham graduate Jake Carter is first author on a publication in PNAS entitled: Ultrarapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA using a reverse transcription-free exponential amplification reaction, RTF-EXPAR

Over the summer, four of our PhD students began their three-month placements at the Rosalind Franklin Laboratory (the ‘Megalab’ in Leamington Spa), as part of its new pilot scheme to support the prestigious Midlands Integrative Bioscience Training Partnership (MIBTP).

The Rosalind Franklin Laboratory processes thousands of COVID-19 tests a day and, once genomic sequencing has been rolled out, will play an indispensable role in responding to new variants of concern. If the laboratory’s PhD pilot is successful, it will be offered to all five universities in the MIBTP.

See the Warwick Community Engagement webpage for further information.

Recent MIBTP Warwick graduate Dr Marisa Di Monaco has won the SEM Faculty Thesis Prize for her thesis 'Molecular mechanisms and transcriptional regulation of autophagy in Drosophila'. Marisa was supervised by Professor Ioannis Nezis and Dr Alex Jones.

Final year Birmingham student Ilyas was named first author of a very comprehensive review on tripartite efflux pumps and type 1 secretion systems, published in Chemical Reviews at the end of April: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chemrev.1c00055

Dr Harun Rashid, a member of the first MIBTP cohort, has recently published two further papers as a result of his research:

1. Cheng, W., Rashid, H.A., Stark, R. and Thomas, B. 2021. The role of organ – and daylength - specific gene expression and resource management in onion (Allium cepa L.). Scientia Horticulturae, 286: 110223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2021.110223

2. Cheng, W., Rashid, M.H.A. and Thomas, B. 2021. Changes in the expression of photoperiodic bulbing genes in response to increasing daylength in long-day and short-day onion varieties. The Journal of Horticultural Science and Biotechnology,https://doi.org/10.1080/14620316.2021.1928556

Final year Warwick student Holly is named first author on a recent published paper based on her PhD research: https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1462-2920.15451 

2nd year Warwick student Chris published a paper as a result of his mini-project looking at single-cell analysis of a new promoter system for recombinant protein production in E. coli, in collaboration with Doug Browning and Steve Busby (University of Birmingham). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871678421000583

Final year Birmingham MIBTP student Joanna has published her first first author paper looking at mitochondrial dynamics in plants, and using social networks to gain insight why these organelles move the way they do:

https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(21)00133-2

Christian, a final year student on the MIBTP programme, based at Warwick, has published a new paper based on his PhD research:

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/10/6/556

Matt Jones, MIBTP Warwick 3rd year student has published two published papers as a result of his PhD research:

A (co)first author review on biases in RNA sequencing:

https://academic.oup.com/bib/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bib/bbab148/6265204

And the peer reviewed version of a preprint that was on the news page (2 years ago!)

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-020-02227-5