Hamish Todd, second-year EASTBIO student, presents Virus, the Beauty of the Beast - an interactive documentary on Friday, 30 June 2017 at The Banshee Labyrinth, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Viruses, in spite of the pain they cause us, are some of the most beautiful creatures in the world, covered in varied and intricate patterns - the patterns on Zika virus actually have connections to medieval Islamic art.

'Virus, the Beauty of the Beast' is a documentary, three years in the making, about the patterns we find in the shapes of viruses, and how understanding them can help us fight those viruses. It has a particular focus on HIV, Zika virus, and Hepatitis and, by using animation and simulation, it explores what the patterns tell us about viruses, but also what they tell us about the human designs that they appear in (buildings, golf/foot/zorbing balls, origami, gamma ray and neutrino detectors, alloys, and more).

EASTBIO successfully awarded 6 BBSRC Research Experience Placement awards to excellent undergraduate students to enable them to gain lab experience during the summer months of 2017.

More information about this year's successful projects can be found here.

The next call will be advertised in the same page no later than March 2018.

The International Society of Avian Endocrinology (ISAE) held its quadrennial conference from October 11-14 2016 at Niagara-on-the-lake in Ontario, Canada. ISAE is an event which takes place every four years in a rotation system between Asia, Europe, and America, and is dedicated to showcase up-to-date advancements in the field of avian endocrinology, while bringing together scientists from all over the world. With a combination of plenary lectures, symposia, and poster sessions, ISAE2016 is the ideal venue to meet other scientists and exchange information on a wide range of avian species. Topics discussed include, endocrinology of behaviour, endocrine disruptors, neuro-endocrine control of reproduction, feeding and metabolism, circadian rhythms and clock genes.

The British Society of Neuroendocrinology held its annual conference this year in Glasgow on the 28th-30th August.  The conference began with an ESR training workshop covering the latest scientific techniques, science communication and publishing strategies.  This was followed by a series of talks and poster presentations from students and scientists from around the world showcasing the latest pioneering research in the field of neuroendocrinology.

Two of our Eastbio DTP students, Angus Reid (University of Edinburgh) and David Walker (University of St Andrews; see photo on the right), received joint first prize for their poster presentations at the event.

A long series of thanks is due to a whole lot of people this year.

The EASTBIO team and community extends a warm thank you to the host university team - Judith and Joyce - and the student reps - Ara, Scott, Selma, Alex, Dave, Georgia - for their brilliant work designing, organising and delivering the EASTBIO Annual Symposium 2016. Their ideas, organisational skills and commitment throughtout the spring and summer terms but also on the two days of the event are largely the reason why the symposium worked so well. Thanks to our tweeting students too!

We also like to thank our guest speakers professors Luke Alphey and Nicola Clayton and artist-in-residence Clive Wilkins for their remarkable contributions to the Symposium programme.

Dave Walker, our second-year student rep has a publication out - see more here.

The paper explores the cellular signalling pathways that permit glucocorticoids and insulin to stimulate Na+ transport within cortical collecting duct cells.  The authors discovered that both glucocorticoids and insulin regulate Na+ retention via expression of serum glucocorticoid
kinase 1 (SGK1) through two distinct physiological mechanisms.

The paper has also been highlighted in a recent editorial too, here. You may recognise a reference to a certain piece of work by JRR Tolkein...

Dave, who's also helped with the organisation of the EASTBIO 2016 Symposium, twits at djw23_MOB

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 collaboration with the protein data bank, he intends to use virtual reality technology to improve the way that biomolecules are illustrated. If you can find your protein of interest on the protein data bank, he intends that the user will simply have to click one button to be taken to a VR representation of it, which may be twisted arbitrarily and docked to other proteins. By allowing multiple people to view a person interacting with a protein in a single environment, the vision is to bring something very new to biology teaching.

Here's a visualisation on it.

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:

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.