Bioscience Research Group Seminar Series

Delivered by Dr Emmanouil Karteris, Division of Biomedical Sciences, Brunel University London

Delivered by Dr Eric Hill, School of Life & Health Sciences, Aston Research Centre for Healthy Ageing, Aston University

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia affecting around 36 million people worldwide. It is impossible to study such changes in the cells of living patients, and it is difficult to adequately study the disease in animals as they do not naturally develop the condition. A revolutionary technique now allows stem cells to be generated from the skin cells of individual patients. In this seminar Dr Hill will discuss the use of these induced pluripotent stem cells to generate functional brain models to study AD and how advancements in tissue engineering are allowing scientists to build complex neural circuits to study development and disease.

Delivered by Professor Peter Mullany, Microbial Diseases, UCL Eastman Dental Institute,
Faculty of Medical Sciences

Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) can spread genes between bacteria, sometimes even between very distantly related organisms. In this talk I will illustrate, using examples taken from my research, the different types of MGEs and the effect they can have on bacteria and consequently on humans.

As well as providing challenges for humans MGEs offer many opportunities in the field of biotechnology. Evolution has equipped them with the ability to cross bacterial cell walls and membranes, to enter and genetically manipulate bacterial genomes. These abilities have been utilised by molecular biologists for the last 60 years or so to make huge advances in biological sciences. Furthermore, the response of the host bacteria to protect themselves from MGEs such as production of restriction enzymes and CRISPR Cas systems has also been used by scientists to revolutionise molecular biology.

I will give a brief example of some of our current work using CRISPR Cas systems to target antibiotic resistance genes on MGEs.

Delivered by Dr Caroline Formstone, Department of Clinical, Pharmaceutical & Biological Science, University of Hertfordshire, UK

The skin provides a protective layer for the body against desiccation and external assault. How skin is built in the embryo has been long studied but little is known about how it encompasses the body. My research has shown that the skin emerges in mouse embryos just over half-way through gestation. The skin appears as a thickened tissue at the mid-flank of the embryo trunk which subsequently thins and spreads from the mid-flank towards the front of the embryo (ventral-side) and the back of the embryo (dorsal-side) eventually enclosing the embryo trunk 2-3 days later. I will provide evidence that skin enclosure of the embryo body requires both intrinsic and extrinsic processes. Overall, my research raises the hypothesis that failure to enclose the embryo body with skin may underlie some common birth defects of dorsal and ventral closure and importantly that extrinsic factors may reduce their prevalence.

Delivered by Prof. Ana-Nicoleta Bondar, Department of Physics, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

The new SARS-CoV-2 virus is known to bind via the spike protein (protein S) to the human host ACE2 receptor followed by proteolytic activation of S. Structural signatures of conformations sampled by protein S were identified with graph-based algorithms in static structures and simulations of protein S. We found that the closed conformation of protein S has, at key functional sites, three-fold symmetrical H-bond clusters. Loss of three-fold symmetry as observed in open and closed conformations of the spike protein could facilitate conformational selection for receptor and protease interactions. Instead of discrete interaction pairs, the receptor-binding interface consists of an extensive interaction network that includes multiple groups from both protein S and ACE2, which could explain strong binding affinity and provide robustness.

Delivered by Dr. Bill Broadhurst, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge

I will provide a brief introduction to protein dynamics on different timescales and ways of quantifying these processes, with a particular focus on NMR spectroscopy. I will then discuss an application to the conformational plasticity of ligand-bound ternary complexes of the beta1-adrenergic receptor, a model G-protein coupled receptor (Nature Communications (2020) 11, 669). After that I will describe some of my work on the dynamics of acyl carrier protein domains in modular polyketide synthase multienzyme complexes (Biochemical J (2016) 473, 1097-1110; Scientific Reports (2019) 9, 2325; Chemical Comm (2017) 53, 11457-11460).