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

A review article co-authored with Rachel O'Reilly has been accepted in Chem. Soc. Rev., entitled. "To Aggregate, or not tot Aggregate? Considerations in the Design and Application of Polymeric Thermally-Responsive Nanoparticles"

This review article brings together observations from a vareity of thermally-responsive nanoparticles, where the corona contains the responsive unit. In particular, focus is placed on linking the observable macroscopic outcomes of the transition (collapse and/or aggregation) with the underlying transitions.

DOI:10.1039/C3CS60035A read the paper here.

See the webpage for details:

11th March, Burlington House, Royal Society of Chemistry, London.

1 day glycoscience meeting for early-career researchers. All fields and backgrounds are welcome, as long as your interested in glycosciences.

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!

2nd Year PhD student Dan Phillips has won the prize for best poster at the recent RSC Nanoscience Symposium, held at the University of Birmingham. Congratulations.

From 1st October, Dr Matthew Gibson has been promoted to Assistant Professor.

Rob Deller one first prize for his poster at the SCRA Microscopy Conference, 21/09/12. His poster detailed his work on novel cryopreservation strategies based on modulating the growth of ice crystals.

Well done!