News

The group is very proud of Sam Firth (4th year PhD student), who participated in Pint of Science Newcastle yesterday and shared her knowledge about all things copper to the general public. Well done, Sam! Here’s a photo of Sam in action:

We are very grateful to the Royal Society for awarding us a 1-year Research Grant to study how metal availability is managed during host-microbiota interactions.

We are very pleased to see this collaborative paper published!

The group’s latest preprint on salivary histatins is now live on bioRxiv. Congratulations to all authors, especially co-first authors Louisa and Jin!

We have one funded, 4-year PhD position that will suit candidates with a background in biochemistry or microbiology. The project will examine how metal availability affects host-microbiota relationships. More details here: https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/a-balancing-act-how-hosts-control-metal-availability-to-their-microbiota/?p137656.

We are also looking for a Master’s of Science by Research student to work on this project.

If you are interested, please contact Karrera.

We are very grateful to have been awarded a Durham Seedcorn Grant to work on metal-binding peptides from ants (yes, ants!!). This work is a collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Jonathan Klassen and Assoc. Prof. Alfredo Angeles-Boza at the University of Connecticut, USA.

Level 3 undergraduate students Sacha Lee, Alex Sutherland, and Selina Shen have all joined the group. For 5 weeks they will all be working on different projects, but all projects are related to Cu homeostasis (obviously!).

The group is very excited to welcome Lotte O’Hern, a 4th year Chemistry-Biology Natural Sciences research student, who will be working with us and Prof. Steven Cobb to examine a Cu-binding peptide from pathogenic Neisseria. Welcome, Lotte!

We are very sad to bid farewell to Jin Hong, who has completed her Master’s by Research year with us. We went to the Durham Cat Cafe to celebrate her time in Durham, but we were so busy playing with the cats, we forgot to take a group picture! We wish Jin all the very best in her future endeavours.

We said goodbye to Issy Holmes, who graduated with a 1st class in MSci (Chemistry-Biology). Congratulations, Issy! We wish her all the best in her future endeavours.