Timur Avkiran, a postgraduate researcher in the Department of Chemistry, has been awared an Industrial Fellowship by The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to design and synthesise small molecule drugs for improving Tuberculosis treatment.

On Saturday morning (east cost US time, Saturday night in UK), a team of students from Edgecombe Community College (Carolina, USA), in collaboration with NASA and NC space grant, will launch a student-lead high altitude baloon, including an experiment based on the GibsonGroups innovative cryopreservation science.

The balloon will be launched to 60 to 100,000 feet, so high that the curvature of the Earth will be clearly visible. It will contain experiments to track movement, altitude humitity and more, but also 1 additional science experiment. The students, lead by Jillian Leary approached Professor Gibson to ask if the GibsonGroup's unique ice-growth inhibiting polymers, inspired by Natures antifreeze proteins, could be included as an experiment to see how cells respond to the harsh high-altitude envirnoments. The polymers are design to stop ice crystals growing, and enables cells, which would otherwise need large volumes of toxic solvents to survive being frozen and stressed. This technology has the potential to revolutionise regenerative and transplantation medicine.

The launch will be streamed live on facebook https://www.facebook.com/EdgecombeCC/posts/?ref=page_internal

Read more here https://www.edgecombe.edu/news/students-preparing-high-altitude-balloon-launch/

Several studentship opportunities for PhD study are available in the Chemistry Department of Warwick University.

Collaborative work between the Blindauer group and the teams of Prof. Wladek Minor (University of Virginia), Dr Maksymilian Chruszcz (University of South Carolina) and Dr Alan Stewart (University of St. Andrews) has been highlighted in a press release entitled “Here’s How Your Body Transports Zinc to Protect Your Health“.

This relates to a recent joint publication which reports the first X-ray crystal structures of human and equine serum albumins bound to zinc. Serum albumin is the major carrier of zinc in the blood and is required for the effective systemic distribution of this essential nutrient. The new findings are published in the RSC journal Chemical Science. Full text of the open-access article is available here.

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 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.

The GibsonGroup's latest research into the use of biomaterials to increase the availability of donor cells has been published in Angewandte Chemie. Donor cells (e.g blood, bone marrow) are crucial to modern healthcare but due to their short shelf life they must be frozen using organic solvents as 'antifreezes'. The Gibson group has pionnered the use of synthetic polymers which inhibit ice crystal growth and their application to cryopreservation. In this work, a collaboraiton with Prof. Steve Armes at Sheffield, the team used biomimetic block copolymer micelles to provide a hydrated 'matrix' around the cells, which in combination with ice inhibiting polymers enable succesful cryopreservation of red blood cells. This is the first example of a cryopreservation system using entirely synthetic polymer materials, providing control and additional functionality into the system. Post-thawing, the micelles warm up, and become 'worm-like' which enabled the direct formation of a hydrogel, which is of interest for tissue engineering.

Read the paper here

Combining Biomimetic Block Copolymer Worms with an Ice-Inhibiting Polymer for the Solvent-Free Cryopreservation of Red Blood Cells

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.

Warwick Chemistry, Life Science and Medical School team up to make a new generation of readily self-assembled metallohelices kill cancer cells at very low concentration (40 nM) but have low toxicty to microbes, insects and healthy human cells.