News

Our paper, “Role of Glutathione in Buffering Excess Intracellular Copper in Streptococcus pyogenes“ is now published in mBio. Congratulations to Louisa and co-authors!

Karrera delivered a virtual invited talk for the University of East Anglia School of Chemistry seminar series. We hope that an actual visit to Norwich will be possible in the near future.

The group welcomes Isabel Holmes, a 4th year Natural Sciences undergraduate co-supervised by Prof. Steven Cobb (Department of Chemistry), and Jin Hong, a Masters by Research student. Both Issy and Jin will study Zn handling in Group A Streptococcus.

Karrera recently talked to Dr Katherine Wu at the New York Times about the antimicrobial properties of copper.

Our first preprint is out!

This was a fruitful collaboration with colleagues at The University of Queensland, Doherty Institute and The University of Melbourne, and Newcastle University.

For a general explanation of the work, please read our tweetorial.

Jin Hong has joined the lab as a 3rd year undergraduate Research Project student. For 5 weeks, Jin will study metalation of the nitrite reductase AniA from Neisseria gonorrhoeae.

We are very excited to welcome (soon-to-be-Dr) Louisa Stewart to the team! Louisa is a postdoc in the lab, funded by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award. She will start a new branch of research in the lab and study metal-dependent host-derived antimicrobial peptides. The work is a collaboration between our group with Assoc Prof Steven Cobb (Durham Chemistry) and Assoc Prof Nick Jakubovics (Newcastle University).

We’re very excited to welcome back Jack Bolton. Jack was an MBiol student in the lab and he has now returned to commence his PhD, funded by the BBSRC Newcastle-Liverpool-Durham Doctoral Training Partnership. Jack will study copper trafficking and the bacterial denitrification pathway.

We are very sad to see Dan go after a very productive time (6.5 weeks) in the lab. Dan was funded by a a Microbiology Society Harry Smith Vacation Studentship. He worked with PhD student Sam Firth to study Cu homeostasis in pathogenic Neisseria species. Dan will go on to complete his 3rd year as a Biomedical Sciences student at Durham. We wish Dan all the best in his future endeavours.

Sam presented her work as a poster at the recent Gordon Research Seminar and Gordon Research Conference in Cell Biology of Metals, in Barcelona, Spain. Sam’s conference attendance was funded by an ECR Travel Grant from the Metals in Biology BBSRC NIBB.