News

30 Jul 2018

Third Year Postgraduate Symposium 2018

The Department of Biochemistry's annual Third Year Postgraduate Symposium was held on Tuesday 26th June.Throughout the day, final year postgraduate students presented a summary of their work. The judges were extremely impressed with the consistently high quality of the presentations, reflecting the wide range of projects available within our Depart…

19 Jul 2018

World Emoji Day

On Tuesday 17th July, the Department celebrated World Emoji Day with a science communication competition!To celebrate #WorldEmojiDay 2018, the Department held its first science communication competition to encourage our researchers to think about how they communicate their research using non-specialist language, or, in this case, without using word…

18 Jul 2018

Qkine and Antiverse amongst winners in Accelerate@Babraham competition

Qkine and Antiverse have been announced as some of the winners in the Accelerate​@Babraham 2018 competition.Congratulations to Qkine and Antiverse, two companies with close links to our Department, on being announced as winners of the Accelerate​@Babraham competition. This competition aims to support the development of science concepts by providing…

13 Jul 2018

A community approach for new experimental model systems

Dr Ross Waller, and collaborators from across the globe, have published a new paper in PLoS Biology describing a new community-based approach for developing model marine protists.Biological research frequently involves the use of model organisms for the study of particular processes or traits, with the expectation that the discoveries made will pro…

6 Jul 2018

LGBTQ+ STEM Day 2018

On Thursday 5th July, the Department joined forces with scientific organisations across the globe to celebrate the first international day of LGBTQ+ people in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).As an international event, 5th July was selected as this date can be written as "507", which in nanometres is the wavelength of the colour gr…

28 Jun 2018

Summer BBQ 2018

Summer has (finally) arrived!On Wednesday 27th June, in the middle of the UK's heatwave, the Department held its annual summer BBQ to give our researchers a much-needed break from laboratory work now that the academic year is over.Much fun, food, and drinks were had by all, along with one of the most intense games of Jenga the Department has ever s…

27 Jun 2018

New Centre of Excellence in Dynamic Single-Molecule Analysis for Accelerated Drug Discovery

LUMICKS collaborates with AstraZeneca and our Department to form the first ever Centre of Excellence for Dynamic Single-Molecule Analysis for Accelerated Drug Discovery and Biology.LUMICKS, a world leader in dynamic single-molecule analysis, has partnered with AstraZeneca and our Department to form the Centre of Excellence for Dynamic Single-Molecu…

19 Jun 2018

Undergraduate Students' Garden Party 2018

Exams are over! It's the end of the academic year!On Friday 15th June, the Department held its first (hopefully to become annual) Undergraduate Students' Garden Party to celebrate the end of the academic year. The party was a huge success with our students, Group Leaders and examiners all indulging in a dinner of chips, ice cream, sweets and popcor…

15 Jun 2018

Mismatch recognition by echinomycin may be harnessed for cancer detection

Michael Waring, and collaborators in Taiwan, have published a new paper in the journal Nucleic Acids Research on the recognition of T:T mismatches by echinomycin.The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs. Whenever cells divide, there is a small risk of spurious errors arising in our DNA due to spontaneous mistakes by the replication mechanism,…

8 Jun 2018

p53 impairs CRISPR/Cas9 in healthy cells

The Taipale Group, and their collaborators, have published a new paper in Nature Medicine that may improve the efficiency of CRISPR in non-tumorigenic cells.The ability for scientists to make precise, targeted changes to the genome of living cells is essential for modern biological research. For example, RNA interference (RNAi) is currently a stapl…

6 Jun 2018

Jo Rees receives Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Dr Jo Rees has completed her Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (PGCTLHE) at the University of Cambridge.Jo was amongst the first cohort to gain the PGCTLHE qualification, a new teaching course offered by Cambridge University. Having completed the TAP (Teaching Associate Programme) back in 2014, Jo was keen to lea…

31 May 2018

Stephen Dolan shortlisted for Young Microbiologist of the Year Competition

Dr Stephen Dolan from the Welch Group has been shortlisted for the Sir Howard Dalton Young Microbiologist of the Year 2018 competition.Stephen completed his PhD in Molecular Microbiology at Maynooth University in Ireland, where he unravelled the biosynthesis of toxic secondary metabolites produced by the human fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus.…

23 May 2018

Cambridge Glycoscience receives Agri-Tech grant to disrupt the sugar industry

Cambridge Glycoscience has been awarded an Eastern Agri-Tech Research, Development and Prototyping Fund grant to develop their natural sugar alternative.Founded in 2017 by Dr Tom Simmons and Professor Paul Dupree from our Department, Cambridge Glycoscience's mission is to develop functional food ingredients for a low-sugar, high-fibre, all-around h…

22 May 2018

A handful of transcription factors confer a hierarchical gene expression landscape

The Taipale Group have published a new paper in Nature Biotechnology on the pattern of regulatory interactions involved in gene expression.DNA contains the genetic information that all cells require to make the proteins and some other molecules that they need in order to grow, develop, reproduce and conduct their normal functions. Although almost e…

21 May 2018

DNA-targeting Molecules as Therapeutic Agents: a new book edited by Michael Waring

Professor Michael Waring has edited a new book, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, entitled "DNA-targeting molecules as therapeutic agents".This new book explains key aspects of the remarkable progress that has been made towards understanding how drugs can bind specifically to nucleic acids; processes which underpin the endeavour to make …