An international collaboration of researchers, including Dr Kristen Panfilio from the School of Life Sciences, have sequenced the genome of the milkweed bug, enabling scientists to understand at the molecular level what makes the bug, from its colourful development to its toxic diet.

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Autophagy – the process of recycling cellular material in the body, can help combat Salmonella and other pathogens according to Dr Ioannis Nezis and colleagues who have studied how autophagy can get rid of bacteria, and prevent diseases developing.

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On Thursday 13 June, the School of Life Sciences and Warwick Medical School Athena SWAN committees will jointly be hosting an event on 'Raising Awareness on Bullying and Harassment'.

Please, register for this FREE event.

If you have any queries, please contact asevent2019@warwick.ac.uk

The thirteenth annual meeting exploring the chemistry and biology of natural products will be held at the University of Warwick on 25 June.

Last year’s conference attracted 180 delegates. We believe this meeting will once again be an excellent opportunity for PhD students and PDRAs to present their work to an audience of experts. Registration is £15, including lunch, wine reception, dinner and prizes for best talks and posters. Further details can be found at: warwick.ac.uk/naturalproducts

For any enquires please contact: Matthew Jenner (m.jenner@warwick.ac.uk) or Fabrizio Alberti (f.alberti@warwick.ac.uk).

Flax naturally adapted to new environments rather than by human influence due to a set of genes that enable it to change its architecture according to research led by Professor Robin Allaby.

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Say goodbye to tangled up Christmas lights, as self-lighting Christmas trees could be the future thanks to scientists from the Warwick Integrative Synthetic Biology Centre (WISB) using VR.

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New evidence reveals that the evolution of Maize in South America is more complex than initially thought, and there was a further geographical area in which partial domestication occurred in the Southwest Amazon - according to an international collaboration of researchers including the University of Warwick, and published in the journal Science.

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On Tuesday 27 November the School of Life Sciences (SLS) held its second Public Science event of the 2018/19 academic year on the Gibbet Hill campus. The event entitled ‘Is Ageing Inevitable?’ was run by Dr Andre Pires da Silva and Professor Nicholas Dale.

As children we learn that plants grow in it and worms live in it and that's generally as far as we go. But the mix of minerals, water, air, decaying plant and animal matter and countless microorganisms that make up the top layer of the earth's surface is hugely important, not only for plant life, but for all life on earth. In an article for Warwick Knowledge Centre, Professor Gary Bending and doctoral research student Amy Newman tell us five things we should know about soil.

Five things you need to know about soil

Researchers in Life Sciences are working on ways to contribute to developing safe crops which can be grown in As contaminated soil but reduce the amount of As going to the edible part.

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Professor Christopher Dowson has been awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) grant of £3million to run a three year China-UK AMR Partnership Hub alongside the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The award is part of a project to address antimicrobial resistance in China and support the global fight against superbugs.

Research into the process of ageing hasn’t quite found the key to immortality, but it is revealing the way our bodies change over time and what factors contribute to longer and healthier lives. Evolutionary biologist Dr Andre Pires da Silva is looking at the genetics of a species of roundworm and the length of their lives, with a view to gaining insight into human aging. He has found some astonishing results.

Knowledge Centre article

Applications are invited for an Assistant, Associate or Professor of Ecology and/or Environmental Bioscience to join the School of Life Sciences.

We are also recruiting for an Assistant Professor in Environmental Microbiology.

This is part of our strategic growth on the Gibbet Hill Biology campus, supported by investment in a new £54M Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building that will bring together researchers from Life Sciences and Warwick Medical School.

Dr Amol Bhandare was awarded a $250 Tech Award from Inscopix at the recent Society for Neuroscience's (SfN) 48th Annual Meeting in San Diego, USA. Inscopix is a discovery phase neurotechnology company in Silicon Valley, California which brings together expertise in neuroscience, physics, engineering, and data science and is developing radically new approaches to understanding the brain in health and disease.

The Inscopix Tech Awards are an initiative to encourage graduate students and postdocs to present their research at SfN. Dr Bhandare received the award for his abstract on Central circuits for CO2 chemosensory regulation of breathing in freely behaving mice.

A team led by Dr Christophe Corre (SLS) and Dr Manuela Tosin (Chemistry) have characterised a new bioactive natural product whose derivatives could be used as antibiotics and help fight infections.

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101 seed samples from 18 different types of crop species including onions, carrots and cauliflower are to be deposited at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Arctic Norway on the 31 October 2018, from the UK Vegetable Genebank (UKVGB) at the University of Warwick.

Press Release

The School of Life Sciences achieved a Silver Athena SWAN Charter Mark in the 2018 submission round. The charter mark is an important indicator of work undertaken to address gender equality in academia and professional and support roles.

In the same round the University retained its Silver award and Politics and International Studies (PAIS) received a Bronze award.

Athena SWAN announcement

On 13-14 September, the University of Warwick hosted the 5^th annual M4 Midlands Microbiology Conference organised jointly by Dr Freya Harrison, Dr Yin Chen and Profesor David Roper in SLS as well as Dr Meera Unnikrishnan, and Dr Chrystala Constantinidou, from WMS. The conference attracted over 140 participants from throughout the UK with outside speakers from the Pasteur and Karolinska Institutes, and featured a wide breath of microbiology from environmental phage biology to the influence on the bacteria cell wall in host physiology. Microbiology research at Warwick featured prominently at the conference including poster prize winner Carmina Micelli as well as the Antimicrobial Screening Facility which is a unique facility in the area supporting academic and industrial requirements. The conference was sponsored with generous support from the Microbiology Society, The Company of Biologists and Society for Applied Microbiology as well as a number of exhibiting companies.

Brittany Harrison, a Life Sciences undergraduate student, has been running STEM projects in the SLS teaching labs over the summer. Here she tells us more:

'Every Wednesday throughout August, 25 year 9 and 10 students from secondary schools across Nuneaton, Rugby and Bedworth have joined me in the Life Sciences department at the University of Warwick to complete STEM CREST awards- the only nationally recognised award by the British Science association for STEM enrichment outside of school curriculum. Throughout my summer, I have been an intern for ThinkHigher, a project ran in collaboration with The University of Warwick, Coventry University, local authorities and local FE colleges. ThinkHigher has provided me with a platform to offer these young people the facilities and learning space to expand on their own scientific interests. We have been carrying out investigations in the undergraduate laboratories related to health and disease, which has involved microbiology techniques that I didn’t get to practice until the second year of my degree, as well as interactive tours around the WMG engineering workshops and the Phytobiology facility.

Science is an eternally incomplete topic, and I feel that this fact is only truly understood when exploring science in a practical and creative way, as opposed to text-book learning in schools. Running the CREST awards has provided these young people with a mature learning experience which much more truly represents the everyday life of a scientist.'

UK scientists will join what could be the largest-scale Arctic research expedition ever planned when the German research ship RV Polarstern is deliberately lodged into sea ice to drift past the North Pole. Research includes Dr Hendrik Schaefer of the University of Warwick’s School of Life Sciences.

Press Release

Image courtesy of Alfred Wegener Institute.