Matt Gibson gave a lecture at the Cheltenham Festival of Science (one of the biggest such festivals in the UK). His talk was entitled 'How to Freeze a Human'. In this, he explored the concept of cryopreservation - freezing of tissue and the challenges around this. This included a discussion of just how complex water and ice are - including demonstrations from smashing frozen bananas to using a hammer to nucleate (promote) ice formation...

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).

See the advert here

http://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=63580

A collaboration with Dave Adams (Liverpool) and Manu Vatish (Oxford) has been published in Soft Matter. This paper describes the use of molecular rotors (specialised dyes) to probe complex gelation processes. In addition to giving some understanding into these (complex) assembly processes, we also demonstrated that this could be used to make a glucose-biosensor. Using real urine samples from diabetic patients, the gelation system was shown to be provide an 'on' response in presence of high glucose levels and correlated well with currently used clinical methods.

Read the paper here;

Using molecular rotors to probe gelation

Sarah-Jane succesfully defended her Thesis on Thursday 26th February. Dr Daniel Mitchell (WMS) and Dr Guiseppe Mantovani (Notts) were the examiners. She is the 3rd Dr to emerge succesfully from the GibsonGroup!

Thesis was entitled;

Glycosylated nanomaterials; Neutralization and detection of bacteria and toxins

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

Collaborative work between with Liz Fullam (Warwick Life Sciences) and Richard Thompson (Durham Chemistry) conducted by Richard Lowery has been published in Chemical Communications.

This work describes the use of a new method for probing nutrient uptake into (pathogenic) bacteria, with the aim of increasing our understanding of their surival mechanisms. Here we showed that deuterium-labelled sugars could be used as 'label-free' probes for uptake using Nuclear Reaction Analysis; a technique more commonly used for depth profiling materials. Deuterium is easy to incorportate, and due to its relativley low natural abundance can be easily detected in isolated bacteria.

Read the article here; http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/cc/c4cc09588j#!divAbstract