Prestigious RSC awards for Prof. Rachel O'Reilly, Dr Józef Lewandowski and PhD student Zoe Ayres.

An antibody that senses one enantiomer of plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) is characterised and published by Marsh and Napier groups in Chemistry and Life Sciences in PLOS ONE.

Collaborative work from the groups of Chaplin, Unwin, Rourke, and Wedge (Warwick physics) exploring the organometallic chemistry of paramagnetic complexes of palladium(I) and platinum(I) has been published in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 

Collaborative research with Warwick Medical School and UHCW NHS Trust reveals new clues to widely prescribed therapeutics' actions in body. Simvastatin sodium salt and fluvastatin interact with human gap junction gamma-3 protein in PLOS ONE Press coverage in Health Spectator.

Collaborative work involving Lewandowski group was published in PNAS. The study led P. van der Wel (U. Pittsburgh) provides insights on structure and formation mechanism for huntingtin exon 1 fibrils implicated in Hungtington disease. Read more here.

An Angew. Chem. VIP from Lewandowski group investigates the influence of different intermolecular interactions on protein dynamics. The paper presents first ever extensive site-specific relaxation measurements on a large non-crystalline protein-antibody complex in a few nanomole quantities. The study paves the way for direct characterization of dynamics in biologically important but sensitivity-limited samples of proteins within large complexes.

A recent paper by the GibsonGroup in Chem Commun has been highlighted in the RSC Magazine 'Chemistry World'. The Gibson Group have a research program focussed on mimicking the function of Antifreeze Proteins which are found in Polar fish species. These proteins can slow the rate of ice growth, which has been identified as a challenge in the cryopreservation of donor cells and tissue for transplantation. In this work they showed a facile route to new cryoprotective polymers, using cheap, commodity polymer starting materials. These polymers were shown to have ice growth inhibition activity and to signficantly reduce the ice-induced damage during red blood cell freeze/thaw storage. In a second paper, the group also reported signficantly enhanced cryopreservation using poly(vinyl alcohol).

Read the Chemistry World article here

Read the Chemical Communications article here; Rational, yet simple, design and synthesis of an antifreeze-protein inspired polymer for cellular cryopreservation

Read our recent ACS Biomaterials Science and Enginneering paper here Glycerol Free Cryopreservation of Red Blood Cells Enabled by Ice Recrystallization Inhibiting Polymers

Work performed in Richard Walton’s group has been selected as a Research Highlight in the Diamond Light Source Annual Review for 2014-2015. In this work, carried out by PhD student Craig Hiley, the structures of three new metastable ruthenium oxides were determined in a collaborative project between Warwick and sustainable technology company Johnson Matthey. Ruthenium oxides are used in electro-catalysis for water oxidation and reduction, in heterogeneous catalysis, and are also of interest for their electronic and magnetic properties

http://www.diamond.ac.uk/Home/Corporate-Literature/Annual-Review/Review2015/Villages/Engineering-and-Environment-Village/The-structures-of-new-ruthenium-oxides-from-aqueous-chemistry.html

Józef Lewandowski was awarded Anatole Abragam Prize of International Society of Magnetic Resonance "for his outstanding accomplishments to date and his promise in the development of solid-state NMR methodology and its application to the study of biomolecular structure and dynamics." The prize will be presented during ISMAR Conference in Shanghai.

Józef Lewandowski in collaboration with Lyndon Emsley (EPFL, Lausanne/ENS-Lyon) and Martin Blackledge (IBS, Grenoble) reports in Science on a direct observation of hierarchy of protein and solvent motions in protein conformational energy landscape. The findings of the study employing a series of variable temperature magic angle spinning multinuclear NMR relaxation measurements on a nanocrystalline protein reconcile divergent interpretations from techniques that are individually sensitive to dynamic phenomena occurring on different time scales and at different locations in protein-solvent systems. Read more in Science.

Zoe Ayres and Sarah-Jane Richards (from Electrochemistry and Gibson Groups) won the main and runner up prizes in the first #RSCAnalyticalPoster competition. The competition was entirely based on twitter, with the aim of creating a poster, which succinctly summarised an application or method in analytial science. The competition attracted signficant interest with > 1k tweets, to an audience >300k and >1 million impressions.

Sarah-Jane won the main prize with her poster 'Cholera and Sugars' and Zoe a runner-up prize with her poster using diamond electrochemical Sensors.

Dr Matthew Gibson has been awarded the RSC/Dextra Medal for Carbohydrate Science. This award, which is sponsored by Dextra Laboratories, was founded in 1970. It is presented to a scientist in the early/mid stage of their career for meritorious work in carbohydrate chemistry that has largely been conducted in the UK.

Matt will present a lecture, and recieve the medal at the joint RSc/COST MultiglycoNano Meeting in Bangor, Wales, in April.

To read more about the GibsonGroup's research visit their webpage.