We were delighted when Tom Smith’s artwork was chosen for the front cover of the RSC’s Chemical Biology journal in January 2024!
About the artwork: “When deciding how best to summarise the work from our paper into some art we were thinking about the themes of developing cyclic peptide hits using experimental vs bioinformatic guided data. It just so happens that at the end of 2023, Newcastle University’s Glassblowing team ran a series of festive glassblowing workshops to raise funds for Newcastle Hospital Charity. There we encountered some incredible glass designs, including a hand made from glass, by our talented glass blower Robyn Hare (Newcastle University Research Facilities). We thought this would be perfect for our artwork to represent the experimental work carried out by hand against the backdrop of next generation sequencing bioinformatic data, all towards developing cyclic peptides.” (Tom Smith)
The new paper on Tom Smith and Bhaskar Bhushan’s work – about mRNA-display methods for identifying and engineering cyclic peptides for specificity/potency – was in collaboration with NovoNordisk. You can access it online: Identification and engineering of potent cyclic peptides with selective or promiscuous binding through biochemical profiling and bioinformatic data analysis (rsc.org)
Left: Glass hand
Right: Our festive glass baubles being cooled.