News

Sam and Karrera had a great day volunteering at Soapbox Science Newcastle, a public outreach event to promote Women in STEM. Jeanette Alcaraz a PhD student from the Clark Lab (Durham Biosciences) is also pictured below.

Bonjour! Karrera delivered a talk at the Institut de Biologie Intégrative de la Cellule in Gif-sur-Yvette, Paris, France. A huge merci beaucoup to Dr Soufian Ouchane and his group for the invitation and for very interesting discussions on bacterial Cu homeostasis! There was enough time before the plane home for an obligatory quick trip to the Eiffel Tower.

We are very grateful to the Metals in Biology BBSRC NIBB for awarding an Early Career Travel Grant to our PhD student Sam Firth. Sam will use the funding to present a poster at the 2019 Gordon Research Conference in Cell Biology of Metals in Barcelona.

Karrera was featured in this fascinating article by C&EN:

We are very grateful to the Microbiology Society for awarding us a Harry Smith Vacation Studentship! The funds will be used to fund Daniel Owen, a Level 2 Biomedical Sciences student at Durham for 6 weeks over the summer. Daniel will work together with our PhD student Sam Firth to examine copper handling in the bacterial periplasm.

We temporarily bid farewell to MBiol student Jack, who has completed two successful terms of research in the lab. Jack is now off to write up his thesis/report. We can’t wait until he’s back as a BBSRC DTP PhD student in October!

Dr Nick Jakubovics recently wrote a commentary on Andrew Turner’s paper on the link between Mn/Fe homeostasis and oxidative stress defence in Group A Streptococcus. The commentary can be found here.

Karrera recently contributed a blog post entitled “The Metal Matters” on WeTalkScience.com, where she described her journey (so far) in studying copper biology. She also doodled the illustrations herself!

This is shaping up to be an amazing 2019! We have been awarded a Springboard Award by the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Wellcome Trust to investigate the action of host-derived effectors of nutritional immunity. Although we have declined to accept the award because of overlap with our Wellcome Trust Seed Award, we are very grateful for the vote of confidence by the peer reviewers and panel members.

Many congratulations and hoorays to our MBiol student Jack, who has been awarded a highly competitive BBSRC DTP Studentship to stay on in the lab as a PhD student come October! Jack will be studying copper trafficking to enzymes that are involved in denitrification and microaerobic respiration.