Events
Meetings and Seminars
All meetings and seminars are currently held virtually. Contact Julie Fyffe for joining information.
Remember to check back regularly for programme updates
Open Centre Meetings
Thursdays, 9.30am - 10.30am
| Date | Speaker and Topic |
| 13 Jan | Theo Andrew (Scholarly Communications Manager, University of Edinburgh) - Overview of the University's new mandatory policy on open science and open access |
| 27 Jan | Prof Andew Millar (Chair of Systems Biology, School of Biological Sciences) - COP26: what was promised, what was delivered, what can SynthSys contribute? |
| 10 Feb | Prof Dominic Campopiano (Chair of Industrial Biocatalysis, School of Chemistry) - Discovery of cryptic bacterial sphingolipids reveals a convergent evolutionary biosynthetic pathway |
| 24 Feb | Meeting cancelled |
| 10 Mar |
Fiona Mischel (Director of International Outreach, Built with Biology) - Overview of Built with Biology (formerly Synbiobeta), opportunities for students, startups, and academia, upcoming plans for the UK and Europe, and how we can get involved. |
| 24 Mar |
Meeting cancelled |
| 07 Apr | Dr Jamie Marland (Lecturer in Microelectronics, School of Engineering) - Interfacing biology and electronics
Semiconductor industry processes and tools are well suited to fabricating miniature bioelectronic devices. In this short talk, I will describe their potential for application in synthetic biosensor systems and implantable medical devices, and outline the direction of my new research group in this area. |
| 28 Apr | Dr Edward Wallace ( Sir Henry Dale Fellow, School of Biological Sciences) - A new function in an old protein family: a regulatory RNA-binding protein descended from a dead enzyme |
| 12 May |
Alexander Speakman (PhD student, Katherine Dunn Group, School of Engineering) - Electrically Directed Gene Expression (EDGE) |
| 26 May |
Arin Wongprommoon (PhD student, Peter Swain & Diego Oyarzun Groups, School of Biological Sciences) - Metabolic cycles are robust and respond to nutrient changes in single cells of budding yeast Sofija Semeniuk (PhD student, Elise Cachat lab, School of Biological Sciences) - A Synthetic Biology Approach To Monitor Cell-Cell Interactions In Tumour Microenvironment |
| 09 Jun | To follow |
| 23 Jun | To follow |
Seminar Series
Thursday 5 May, 9.30am - 10.30am
Speaker: Dr Nicholas Stroustrup (Centre for Genomic Regulation Barcelona)
Title: Measuring and modeling organismal-scale causal interactions in aging.
Abstract: Aging involves a set of functional declines that occur at timescales several orders of magnitude slower than the mechanisms of cell biology and metabolism. At slow aging timescales, the consequences of local molecular events have sufficient time to propagate broadly across cells, tissues, and organs to influence potentially any aspect of physiology. This introduces major technical and conceptual challenges to the identification of the causal drivers of aging, creating a need for new experimental and modelling approaches.
In this seminar I will discuss two approaches being developed in my group to study aging in the C. elegans model. First, following a "top-down" approach, we measured two major macroscopic milestones in aging--the failure of motility and death--under a variety of genetic, pharmaceutical, and dietary interventions. By studying the statistical relationship between these two events, we could identify multiple, distinct organismal aging processes and characterize how they interact. Second, following a "bottom-up" approach, we measured the population-scale gene-regulatory variation that arises between individuals as they age. By systematically mapping the co-expression of genes across the transcriptome, we could identify tissue-scale aging processes super-imposed on top of cross-tissue gene regulatory couplings. Together, these two approaches contribute to a growing experimental tool-set aimed at mapping the casual structure of aging across multiple levels of biological organization.
Host: Dr Linus Schumacher
Thursday 19 May, 9.30am - 10.30am
Speaker: Dr Mato Lagator (University of Manchester)
Title: Mechanistic approaches to studying regulatory evolution in bacteria
Abstract: The field of evolution is largely observational - we observe a consequence of selection or evolution and then reconstruct how that change got to be. Gaining the ability to predict evolution requires understanding how the existing mechanisms that govern how a biological system works define how that system can change. We use this approach to study bacterial promoters, the simplest components of gene regulatory networks. I will discuss how developing mechanistic models based on high throughput experiments allowed us not only to predict expression levels of constitutive promoters in E. coli, but also to gain new insights into how constitutive promoters might evolve.
Host: Dr Helen Alexander
Thursday 16 June. 9.30am - 10.30am
Speaker: Prof Natalio Krasnogor (Newcastle University)
Title: to be confirmed
Host: Dr Giovanni Stracquadanio
Thursday 1 September, 9.30am - 10.30am
Speaker: Dr THomas Howard (Newcastle University)
Title: to be confirmed
Host: Prof Lynne Regan
Thursday 8 September, 9.30am - 10.30am
PhD Speaker: Chiara Villa (St. Andrews/sorbonne universitè LJLL)
Title: to be confirmed
Host: James Holehouse
Thursday 20 October, 9.30am - 10.30am
Speaker: Dr Gabriele Micali (Humanitas Research Hospital)
Title: to be confirmed
Host: Linus Schumacher