A collaborative paper with Besra (Birmingham) and Fullam (Warwick Life Science) has been accepted in the RSC Journal J. Mater. Chem. B.; Materials for Medicine and Biology.

This paper shows some of our early efforts to create new tools for glycobiology - the science of investigating how carbohydrate (sugars) direct biological signalling processes, which are crucial in infection, cancer and fertility. Standard anlytical tools for measuring carbohydrate-protein interactions rely on 'big' equipment such as Mass Spectrometry and Surface Plasmon Resonance which are not cheap nor high throughput. We show here that we can use gold nanoparticles to 'illuminate' carbohydrate binding proteins in assays to measure their activity. This is both cheap, scalable and most importanlty compatible with a simple mobile phone! A photograph is all that is required to measure biological activity.

Read the paper here

Our paper describing how a simple synthetic polymer, PVA, can reproduce the most desirable property of antifreeze glycoproteins - inhibition of ice crystal growth (recrystalization). The paper is published in Biomacromolecules

Read the asap version here

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bm400217j

Richard is joining the team as part of his MOAC miniproject. He will work on a project based on diagnosiing infectious diseases using a mobile phone.

Cecillia Ieong (formally Dove and O'Reilly Groups @ Warwick) joins us as a postdoc from Monday.

Matt Gibson has been awarded the MacroGroup UK Young Researchers Medal for 2012. See list of previous winners here. He will give his award lecture and receive the prize at APME conference in Durham (his alma mater) later this year.

Rob has been awarded a Transatlantic fellowship by the UoW to allow him to particupate in a research project in New York later this year.

Congratulations!

This paper describes a study into the structural features required to mimic the most important property of antifreeze (glyco)proteins - their ability to inhibit ice crystal growth. Here we try to explain why some poly-hydroxylated polymers display signficant activity, but others (such as oligosaccharides) have negliable activity. We also compare a large series of mono/di saccharides and show that their activity is essentially correlated with the number of OH groups in solution rather than any specifics of their structure (although small differences between sugars are well known). Here we postulate that hydrophobic domains are key components of activity.

Read the paper here: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2013/BM/C3BM00194F

Our paper describing how mono/oligo saccharides and synthetic polymers interact with growing ice crystals has been accepted for publication in the new high profile journal Biomaterials Science. This is part of a wider collaboration between chemistry, centre for scientific computing and the medical school. Full details to follow.