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Welcome to the Team Marie-Helene!

Welcome to our new research associate Marie-Helene Ruchaud who joins us from Newcastle University Medical School where she worked on a variety of projects involving innate immunology and inflammation. These included studying the human immune response in epithelial cells following Enteropathogenic E.Coli (EPEC) infection along with the regulation of the innate immune response in severe lung injury & infection or testing potential antimicrobial agents such as p97 inhibitors acting as DNaA inhibitors in Staphyloccocus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. She is currently developing quantitative cellular assays to investigate inhibition of SARS-Cov2 main protease by cyclic peptides. A warm welcome to the team!

Joanna’s viva and baby!

A double congratulations is owed to our own Dr Joanna Bonnici, who successfully navigated the perils of a pandemic-Zoom viva to defend her DPhil thesis in December. With hardly a breath to spare she started a family with her husband Tom, as baby Elsie arrived in late January this year. Joanna has been an asset to the lab throughout her DPhil and is almost certainly, definitely, looking forward to more happy years of research to come… Many congratulations to them all and we look forward to using both events as an excuse to over-celebrate later this year once we are all vaccinated!

Editing a Special Issue on Chemical Genetics and Epigenetics

We’re delighted to publish a special issue with Ganesan in Current Opinion in Chemical Biology around Chemical Genetics and Epigenetics, with contributions from some world leading scientists and long-time collaborators. We’re excited by their contributions and hope you enjoy finding something useful and interesting. Contributors include Sir Prof. Shankar Balasubramanian, Manfred Jung, Udo Oppermann, Maria Berdasco, Antonello Mai, Marianne Rots, Gianluca Sbardella, Alessio Ciulli, Danica Fujimori, Chris Schofield, Angel de Lera and many others. Click here to read!

Congratulations Kieran

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Many congratulations to Kieran Thow for completing his Part II. Kieran made significant progress on the biochemical characterisations of TET-related enzyme. All the best for the future!

Newcastle University Rainbow Network steering committee member

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Benoit Darlot is now an active member of the NU Rainbow Network steering committee. He is investing his time and efforts to defend LGBTQ+ rights on the campus and to foster institutional change within the university to tackle EDI issues. (Blog by B.D.)

Paper in Epigenetics

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Paper in Epigenetics: Hypoxia and hypoxia mimetics differentially modulate histone post-translational modifications – Collaborative work with Chris Schofield, Louise Walport, James McCullagh, Richard Hopkinson and Emily Flashman groups where we report the use of LCMS based intact histone assay to look at the global changes in histone PTMs in response to hypoxia / compound treatment – read the full paper here  

Back to work

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Having a socially distanced out-door lunch break at Newcastle University. Great to see the team come together again! Hopefully all the group members will be able to return to work soon, both at Newcastle and Oxford.

Paper in JBC

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Paper in JBC – Engineered anti-inflammatory peptides inspired by mapping an evasin-chemokine interaction. Our latest paper on the development of anti-inflammatory peptides inspired by tick evasins is out now in Journal of Biological Chemistry.  Multi-disciplinary collaborative work with Prof. Shoumo Bhattacharya & Prof. Carol Robinson Groups, with Benoit Darlot & James Eaton from the group leading the study. This work was funded by the BHF, Oxford BHF Centre for Research Excellence and SBM.