Gibson Group News

The Group will be giving 5 talks at the forth coming ACS National Meeting in San Francisco, 2-5 April. This will cover a broad range of topics inlcuding polymer synthesis, diagnostics, toxin neutralization and antimicrobials, polymer self assembly and tissue cryopreservation!

Come along to the following Talks to hear more!

Matt Gibson

Rational design of antifreeze-protein mimetic materials to enable the cryopreservation of cells
Wednesday, April, 05, 2017 from 11:15 AM - 11:35 AM
123 - Moscone Center

Matt Gibson

GlycoNanoparticle barcodes for pathogen identification

Tuesday, April, 04, 2017 from 10:30 AM - 10:50 AM
2012 - Moscone Center
Applied Biosensing Based on Functional Colloids
8:30 AM - 10:50 AM

Matt Gibson

Glycopolymers with selectivity as well as avidity through macromolecular enginnering

Tuesday, April, 04, 2017 from 8:35 AM - 9:05 AM
Grand Ballroom West - Grand Hyatt San Francisco

Lewis Blackman
Wednesday 5th April, 13:25 – 13:45
Room 121 Moscone Center
Session: Next Generation Smart Materials

Lewis Blackman
Thursday 6th April, 10:20 – 10:40
Room 123 Moscone Center
Session: Polymers & Biomimicry

On Friday 24th March members of the group took part in World TB day. The aim of the day was to reach out to local communities to inform them of the re-occurance of TB as a disease not just from low-income countries and is no longer a disease consigned to history. There were 10.4 million new cases in 2015 and 1.8 million deaths globally. In order to increase public awareness, on World TB day, we went to Cannon park shopping center to spread the word that TB is still not defeated. Activities for both adults and children, as twitter photograph competition, cross-word puzzle and coloring competition gave the opportunity not only to inform the public about key facts of TB but also to win prizes. Over 350 people visited the stall during the day.

Our recent work towards developing new antibacterial agents to treat tuberculosis has been published in the British Journal of Pharmacology. Tuberculosis is a major global health threat and is currently the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent worldwide. The current treatment regime requires a cocktail of antibiotics to be taken for at least 6 months with numerous side effects, and resistant forms are becoming more wide-spread; there is an urgent need for new drugs.

This project was lead by Dr Elizabeth Fullam from the School of Life Scieinces and investigated the antibacterial properties of a piperindol compound and its corresponding bis-Mannich base against Mycobacterium smegmatis (a model organism for Mycobacterium tuberculosis) and Gram-negative organisms. The two compounds were found to be selective for mycobacteria, rapidly killing, with a selectivity index of >30 fold. Spontaneous resistant mutants to the compounds were also generated to allow identification of the target of these compounds. Our results highlight the piperidinol moiety as an attractive compound class in the development of novel anti-tubercular agents.

Read the paper here

Identification of the anti-mycobacterial functional properties of piperidinol derivatives

Chris, a 2nd year PhD student in the Gibson group, was recently invited to join the materials chemistry subcommittee of the society of chemical industry. This is a group comprised of PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and early career academics as well as recent graduates and post-doctoral staff from within the materials chemistry industry. The intent of the subcommittee is to be responsible for representing the materials division of the SCI on social media, whilst also increasing its representation within universities, and encouraging collaboration between their industrial partners and early career principal investigators. The subcommittee is currently arranging social events, conferences and talks which engage final year undergraduates and PhD students, with the intention of encouraging them to pursue careers within the chemical industry. At the most recent meeting, Chris gave a talk entitled "Synthetic Polymers to Mimic Antifreeze Proteins".

Ben Martyn, Ben Graham. Trisha Bailey and Chris Stubbs have won first place in a Business, Innovation and Commercialisation competition for most investable pitch. This was organised by Warwick Ventures as part of our Postgraduate Transferrable skills program. Well done all!

On thursday, 9th March, Professor Matthew Gibson, gave a seminar at the University of Birmingham. This was part of the Physical Sciences for Health series. In this, Matt discussed the groups past resutls in designed new polymers to mimic antifreeze proteins. He showed the evolution from simple mimics to more advanced polymers and even some non-antifreeze proteins, which have surprising antifreeze-like activity. He also introduced the relatively new topic (to the group) on controlling ice nucleation. The medical and biotechnological applications were also discussed. He even managed to link cruical science discoveries to moments from the Empire Strikes Back...

Caroline won the first place poster prize at the Symposium on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, held at the University of Birmingham in December. This is her third poster prize to-date.

Our latest work from a collaboration with researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz has been published in Biomaterial Science. This research stemmed from a research visit by Dr Christian Freese (the lead author) to the Gibson Lab, building on our previous collaborations.
In this work, cell culture models that more closely reproduce the in vivo environment were used to investigate the impact of PEGylated AuNPs on endothelial cells. The traditional static culture techniques that do not accurately represent the stretch and shear-stress that endothelial cells undergo continuously in vivo, were replaced by culturing the cells under flow and stretch conditions and the resulting cellular stress and function were probed. Due to no toxic effect, cell stress or inflammatory response being observed in these assays, is was concluded that PEGylated gold nanoparticles could be a useful tool for medical applications. Also using these models for cell viability studies could reduce animal experiments and drug development costs.

Read the paper here

Gold nanoparticle interactions with endothelial cells cultured under physiological conditions