Robert Deller (Now PDRA in Bristol) won the Chemistry Department Prize for best Thesis, at the annual postgraduate sympoisum. His Thesis was entitled 'The investigation and application of ice recrystalisation inhibitors as novel cryoprotectants for biological materials'. Rob was co-supervised by Dr Daniel Mitchell (Warwick Medical School) and Dr Manu Vatish (Now Oxford).

On Saturday, May 9th, Matt Gibson's interview with 'Futureproof' - a dedicated science show on NewstalkFM was broadcast. During this, Matt discussed some of the challenges associated with cryopreservation - the freezing of human tissues and cells and how extreomphile organisms survive being frozen. Its relevance to Star Wars (....) was also a topic.

This was a lead-up to Matt's talk at the cheltenham festival of science (2nd June).

https://newstalk.ie/futureproof

Sarah-Jane Richards had won the RSC's first analytical science twitter-based poster competition. The aim was to clearly summarise an area of analytical science, which would be understandable as a poster, uploaded to Twitter.

Sarah-Janes Poster on "cholera and sugars" can be seen here.

Matt Gibson has been awarded the Dextra Medal by the Royal Society of Chemistry's Carbohydrate Group. 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 Spring Meeting of the Carbohydrate Group in Bangor, Wales.

This Award is recognition for the Group's continuing work at interface of polymer and glycosciences. For list of (prestiguous!) previous winners see;

http://www.rsc.org/Membership/Networking/InterestGroups/Carbohydrate/carbohydrate-award/index.asp

Dr. Matthew Gibson has been awarded a prestigious ERC (European Research Council) starting grant, with a value of €1.5 million. These grants are highly competitive and awarded on the basis of science excellence, rather than any targetted research field. Starter grants of for young academics within 7 years of completing their PhD. This grant will accerate the Group's work in the field of Antifreeze GlycoProtein (AFGP) Mimics. In particular, the GibsonGroup have pioneered the use of synthetic polymers as mimics of AFGPs, showing that they are capable of controlling ice crystal growth- The growth of ice is a huge problem in the cryostorage of donated cells and tissues, limiting their availabilty for transplantation and regenerative medicine.

There will be several PhD and Postdoctoral vacanices associated with this.

See the University of Warwick Press release here.

See the Group's recent Nature Communication on this work here.

Our recent paper describing the synthesis and testing of new antifreeze-protein mimetic polymers has been highlighted on the front cover of the RSC journal Biomaterials Science.

Issue here

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Journals/JournalIssues/bm?e=1#!issueid=bm002012&type=current&issnprint=2047-4830

And the paper here

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/bm/c4bm00153b#!divAbstract

Matt was recently invited to discuss an exciting area of reserach for the Australian science Magazine, COSMOS. IN this Matt summarised a recent report which found that antifreeze proteins appear to not only modulate the growth of ice, but also sugars. This finding has both interesting applications in controlled crystal polymorph, for example, but also in explaining how antifreeze proteins differentiate between water, ice and sugar, which are all chemically very similar, in that they present surfaces rich in hydroxyl groups.

Podcast here

The Group's work on antifreeze protein-mimetic polymers to enhance cellular cryopreservation has been featured in the American Chemical Society's magazine Chemical and Engineering News.

Read the full story here (login required)

http://cen.acs.org/magazine/92/09240.html