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

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/chemistry/research/gibson/gibsongroup/facilities/

Our latest paper has been published in Biomaterials science, in Collaboration with Steve Edmonson, Manchester Uni. This papers describes the fabrication of carbohydrate (glycan) coated glass slides using thiol-ene chemistry (sometimes call thiol-ene click). A key challenge in assembling carbohydrates onto surfaces is ensuring their presentation and connectivity (i.e orientation) and mimimising the synthetic steps required. Thiolyated sugars are widely used to attached to gold surfaces for SPR, but this can be very expensive. Our approach involves coating glass slides with acrylates to enable conjguation of the sugars, which can then be applied to conventional microarrays.

Read the paper here

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/bm/c4bm00176a#!divAbstract

Our latest paper on developing new biosensors for carbohydrate binding toxins has been published in ACS Macroletters, based on work by Sarah-Jane.

In this work we study the effect of the polymer spacer - between the biosensory unit (gold nanoparticle) and bio-recognition unit (carbohydrate). We show that the polymer length must be just right; not too long. Not too short. This ensures stability in complex media (saline etc) and but also ensures that upon binding we see a rapid colour change from red to blue. These partilces may find use in point-of-care diagnostics in low resource environments.

Read the paper here http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/mz5004882

Our new paper described the synthesis and testing of new ice-inhibiting cryoprotective polymers has been published in the RSC Journal Biomaterials Science. This paper describes the study of poly(ampholytes), mixed charge polymers, which can slow ice growth. This is only the second ever class of polymers with definate IRI activity.

Read the paper here.

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2014/BM/C4BM00153B#!divAbstract

Rob (formally PhD, now PDRA) in the group has won the prize for the best poster at the 2014 RAPS Recent Appointees in Polymer Science) Conference.

Caroline Biggs has won a poster prize at the 2014 MacroGroup UK young researchers meeting, held in Durham 24/25 July.

Her poster was entitled 'Polymer Functionalised Surfaces for Microarray Applications'

Matt Gibson has moved to a new office in the MAS building, number 4.06 (4th floor, near the elevator).

Phone number is the same, but may not work for a few days.