First-year student Hamish Todd (U o Edinburgh) has been working with the Protein Data Bank to integrate his virtual reality program onto their website: that way he will be enabling people to look at any protein they like in VR!

Proteins and nucleic acids are complex three-dimensional structures. In order to learn, research, or speak about them, we are often required to internally “picture” them - and if we are interested in docking, substrate binding, or point mutations, our ability to picture them will be sorely tested.

In January this year Ben Rutter (U of Aberdeen) attended a 2-week ‘workshop on genomics’ in Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic. It was a very intensive course which was ‘developed in response to the increasing demand for training on how to effectively analyze and manage data generated by modern sequencing technologies’.

Congratulations to another one of our third-year, Douglas Pyott (U of Edinburgh) for his research paper! Details and abstract below or for a link, click here.

Pyott, DE, Sheehan, E, Molnar, A. ‘Engineering of CRISPR/Cas9-mediated potyvirus resistance in transgene-free Arabidopsis plants.’ Mol Plant Pathol. 2016 Apr 21. doi: 10.1111/mpp.12417.

Abstract:

Congratulations to our third-year student Audrey Henderson (U of St Andrews) for her research paper, which came out in April 2016:

Henderson, A. J, Holzleitner, I. J., Talamas, S. N., Perrett, D. I, ‘Perception of Health from Facial Cues’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Katherine Bassil, a final year biology undergraduate with the American Lebanese University, made contact with Edinburgh University through Jane Haley (Edinburgh Neuroscience) to set up a lab placement at the Roslin Institute in Rona Barron's lab with final year Eastbio PhD student Kirsty Ireland.

We hope you will enjoy reading the May 2016 BBSRC DTP/ICP Newsletter. Input by some of the EASTBIO students features here!

Please click on the image below.

The EASTBIO Symposium 2016 on Bioscience Research is to be held at the University of St Andrews on the 13-14 June 2016.

For EASTBIO students and supervisors: To register, please click here.

To view a draft programme, click on the Symposium poster, below.

Lawrence Picton, who recently graduated from the University of St Andrews where he completed his PhD funded by the EASTBIO DTP - he is actually the first

Six BBSRC Research Experience Placements 2016 were awarded across the EASTBIO DTP to:

Alex Websdale, sponsored by Professor Carol Munro (School of Medicine, Medical Sciences and Nutrition, University of Aberdeen), to do a BfH project "Investigating Candida albicans echinocandin drug susceptibility with gain of function mutants”

At the recent EASTBIO DTP 2016 PIPS QA Event in Dundee (12 February), our second-year students were treated to a number of presentations by students who have completed their PIPS and gave some useful insights into actual experiences of placements.

Fraser Murphy (Dundee-based third-year student) shared his slides with us; click on the image below to get a sense of his talk.