News

7 Feb 2020

Green electricity and sustainable science communication at Davos Codes

Dr Paolo Bombelli presented his work on plant-microbial fuel cells to the Davos Codes showcase during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting.The World Economic Forum (WEF) brings together the foremost leaders of business, politics, academia, culture and society to address the most pressing issues on the global agenda. In the context of the WEF Ann…

24 Jan 2020

Part III Project Symposium 2020

On Tuesday 14th and Wednesday 15th January, the Department held its annual Part III undergraduate students' Project Symposium.The start of Lent Term here in the Department of Biochemistry would not be the same without the traditional Part III Project Symposium. For those unfamiliar with the Cambridge system, these are fourth year undergraduate stud…

23 Jan 2020

PomBase awarded ELIXIR-UK Node Service status

PomBase, the model organism database for the fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe), has been awarded ELIXIR-UK Node Service status.ELIXIR-UK Node Services support the bioinformatics and broader biological sciences research communities, and agree on best practices at national, European and international levels. ELIXIR unites Europe's leading lif…

21 Jan 2020

Magnetised molecules used to monitor breast cancer

A new type of scan that involves magnetising molecules allows doctors to see in real-time which regions of a breast tumour are active, according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.This is the first time researchers have demonstrated that this scanning technique, called carbon-13 hyperpolarised imaging, can …

20 Jan 2020

50 year old mystery of collagen I chain registration resolved

The Farndale Group and their collaborators have published a new paper in Nature Chemical Biology that reveals the molecular assembly of type I collagen.Collagens are the most abundant proteins present in mammalian skin and bone, and are the structural components of connective tissues. There are 28 known types of collagen which form sponge-like netw…

10 Jan 2020

The passing of Professor Sir Hans Leo Kornberg

It is with a heavy heart that we report the death of Professor Sir Hans Leo Kornberg on Monday 16th December 2019 at Falmouth Hospital, not far from his home in Brookline Massachusetts.Kornberg was the Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry and Head of our Department from 1975 to 1995, as well as Master of Christ's College from 1982 to 1995. He…

17 Dec 2019

Val Wood awarded DSc higher doctorate

Congratulations to Val Wood, PomBase Curator and Project Manager, who has been awarded a DSc by the University of Manchester for her thesis entitled "Curating and Analysing the Genome of a Model Eukaryote".Fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) is a model organism used to study many aspects of basic cell biology, including the cell cycle, chromo…

21 Nov 2019

Paul Dupree and Steve Jackson named as 2019 Highly Cited Researchers

We are pleased to announce that Paul Dupree and Steve Jackson have been named as 2019 Highly Cited Researchers, with their research among the top 1% most cited works in their respective fields worldwide.On being recognised as one the world's most influential researchers of the past decade, Professor Paul Dupree commented, "I am very proud once agai…

20 Nov 2019

Professor Michael Waring (1939-2019)

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of Professor Michael Waring, Emeritus Professor of Chemotherapy, on Saturday 16th November 2019.Michael was well known to many in the Department due to his long and learned relationship with us as a PhD student, Lecturer, Reader, and then as a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology. He was a Profess…

23 Oct 2019

Revealing the nanostructure of wood could help raise height limits for wooden skyscrapers

The Dupree Group and their collaborators have captured the visible nanostructure of living wood for the first time using an advanced low-temperature scanning electron microscope.There is increasing interest around the world in using timber as a lighter, more sustainable construction alternative to steel and concrete. While wood has been used in bui…

18 Oct 2019

Moss table wins international award

Dr Paolo Bombelli, along with his collaborators Alex Driver and Dr Carlos Peralta at the University of Brighton, has won an international Beyond Bauhaus Award.The 'Beyond Bauhaus: Prototyping the Future' Award recognises ground-breaking designs and concepts that address a socially-relevant topic and which provide creative answers to the pressing qu…

7 Oct 2019

The Cambridge Centre for Proteomics has temporarily moved

The Cambridge Centre for Proteomics (CCP) and Professor Kathryn Lilley's laboratory have moved to the Milner Therapeutics Institute on the Biomedical Campus for the next fourteen months whilst the Gleeson Building is being refurbished.Kathryn and Mike Deery, the CCP Facility Manager, now have a temporary office next to the Library in the Hopkins Bu…

4 Oct 2019

PhD Symposium 2019

The Department recently held its first PhD Symposium, serving as the new centrepiece of our annual celebration of our research strengths and activities.The Symposium brought together our PhD students' third year oral presentations and second year poster presentations into a single, conference-formatted two-day event, held off-site at the Babbage Th…

3 Oct 2019

Don't be shelf-ish!

It's perhaps the stereotypical view of a University building; dusty shelves filled with books and old documents. Certainly a common sight around the University, storage is a key issue for many departments.Our Department is no different. In the bowels of the Hopkins Building, up until recently an archive room lay over-bound with shelves full of a my…

2 Oct 2019

Conjuring up answers to one of life's basic questions

Sixty years after Francis Crick predicted the central importance of protein synthesis, a new project aims to shed light on how it is controlled.Rothamsted Research is to lead one of four UK consortia awarded a total of £14M to explore the fundamental biology of living systems, with the project set to be the biggest study into protein regulation eve…