Gibson Group News

We are part of a large consortium of UK Universities and companies which has been awarded > £3.5 Million over 5 years to develop new methods to obtain speciality glycans (carbohydrates) using a combination of chemistry and enzymes, and translate these to applications. The GibsonGroup is actively involved in this project (details below) and a PDRA will be based at Warwick during this time.

This is funded by Innovate UK, along with BBSRC and EPSRC.

Chemo-enzymatic Synthesis of Speciality Glycans

The vision of the project centres around the translation of traditional and novel methodologies to develop sustainable and versatile platforms for the industrial production of glycans on scale. We will demonstrate the technology by targeting a set of novel glycan materials that are anticipated to have significant transformational potential in human health and disease in diagnostics and glycoengineering applications. This project requires an integrated approach featuring: 1) synthetic chemistry (unnatural building blocks) 2) biocatalysis (enzymatic synthesis of larger glycans) 3) showcasing glycan potential in diagnostics (glycoarray based platforms). The significant anticipated progression of both biocatalysis and glycoarray technologies will reduce commercialisation barriers both in terms of commercial glycan production and 'first in the market' glycan array companies

Dr Matt Gibson is chairing a special symposium in honour of Prof Karen Wooley (Texas A&M) and Prof Cameron Alexander (Nottingham) who have been awarded the RSC Centenary Medal, and MacrogroupUK medal, respectively. In addition to the their award talks, Dr F-F Trillo (B'Ham) and Dr G-L Davies (Warwick) will also give talks.

There is still time to register here

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

Matt has joined the editorial board of Scientific Reports from Nature Publishing group. He will handle manuscripts in fields related to the Lab's research in polymer science, carbohydrate science and biomaterials. Scientific Reports is open access only journal (no double-dipping of access fees).