Am I a counterfeiter?

Asma is a Pakistani PhD student working in Irshad Hussain group in Pakistan. She was supposed to join my lab for a 6 months period starting in December. She had obtained competitive funding from the Higher Education Commission in Pakistan for this visit. Her visa has now been refused by the UK Border Agency (Home Office) and she has no right to appeal.

One element supporting the decision to reject her application was that she had shown a letter of support from the University of Liverpool (my letter) but  “The layout and standard of the letter [...] is of poor quality, especially the headed top part of the letter which looks scanned. I therefore cannot be satisfied that this letter is genuine.”

I had been in contact about 20 times with Asma and Irshad discussing her project, providing a letter and a one page project, etc. The officer could have send an e-mail to me and he/she would have found out in two minutes and without any efforts that there was a real partner and a real project.

Our new immigration rules will have to be revised if we do not want to endanger our collaborative research culture, warned Mathias Brust not so long ago.  Is it still time?

Paul Free leaving to Singapore

After 3 years in the group, Paul is leaving and he will be joining the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) in Singapore.

We wish him all the best in his new job!

November Bionano meeting

Friday 20th November BIONANO lunch-meeting

Seminar Room 1 – School of Biological Sciences

12:30    Olga Mayans, Biological Sciences, Self-assembling protein fibers: peptide display arrays with controlled nanopatterning

12:50    Discussion

1:00      Coffee offered by LINSET – Bring your lunch!

1:20      Haifei Zhang, Chemistry, The Materials Tool Kits: porous materials, colloids and nanofibers

1:40      Discussion

You can download the poster as a pdf here.

Fluorescent Nanosensors for Cellular Analysis

Jonathan Aylott from the University of Nottingham will be giving the School of Biological Sciences Departmental Seminar on the 4th of November at 1pm in Lecture Theatre 1. You can download the poster (pdf) .

Blood or Ribena? Gold…

A couple of weeks ago, Chris and I participated to a science fair at a local secondary school. We had some plastic tubes containing a red solution on our table. Students were curious about these and asked what it was… Their best guess was usually “Blood” although two suggested “Ribena”. When we were explaining that it was “gold” they were shocked. And gold it was, in the shape of very small particles of a few nanometers dispersed in water. Because of their small size, they have very different optical properties than bulk gold and a suspension of these appear red.

Picture: Synthesis of gold nanoparticles (reduction of a gold salt by sodium borohydride)

e-MRS 2010 Spring Meeting, Call for Papers

E-MRS 2010 Spring Meeting

1^st Call for Papers

for the

Symposium B: Functional Biointerfaces

Technical sessions: June 7-11, 2010 Congress Center, Strasbourg, France Abstract deadline: January 19, 2010 More Information: http://www.emrs-strasbourg.com/ The symposium addresses the growing interest of materials scientists in the creation, characterization, and control of processes at functional biointerfaces, i. e, the interfaces between biomolecules, cells, tissues or complex biological systems with other materials. The aim of this symposium is to exchange information about the fundamental understanding, characterization, control and engineering of these interfaces in a thought provoking, stimulating atmosphere. This is not only because of the intellectual challenges of the exciting interdisciplinary field of materials science but also because materials scientists, physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers and medical doctors are facing more and more situations where materials are confronted with challenging biological environments. Therefore, a need exists to develop and spread knowledge in this area. The aim of this symposium is, therefore, to address the need to design, create, characterize and test functional biointerfaces and to develop structure-property relationships for these functional biointerfaces. Hot topics to be covered by the symposium: Subject areas of this symposium include but are not limited to: biointerfaces of medical implants; proteins, polysaccharids and other biomolecules at biointerfaces; engineered micro and nanoenvironments of cells for regenerative medicine; structuring and functionalisation of biointerfaces; molecular cell biology at biointerfaces; antimicrobial biointerfaces; biomineralization at biointerfaces; nanoparticle, nanotube and nanofibre interfaces; gene and drug delivery at biointerfaces; therapy and probes in bioenvironments; sensors and devices; pathogen detection at biointerfaces; characterization of biointerfaces including probe methods; biointerfaces in nature and bioinspired biointerfaces; computational modelling of biointerfaces. Target groups of the symposium: Materials scientists, physicists, chemists, biochemists, engineers, biologists, microbiologists, pharmaceutical scientists, and medical professionals from fundamental and applied research as well as from industry and clinical backgrounds. List of invited speakers: · David M. Lynn, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA · Hsiao-Hua (Bruce) Yu, Inst. Bioengn. & Nanotechnol., Singapore · Raphaël Lévy, University of Liverpool, UK · Holger Schönherr, University of Siegen, Germany · Xingyu Jiang, Beijing, China and many others Scientific committee members: • Klaus D. Jandt • Giovanni Marletta • Christine Ortiz • Alexander Bershadsky • Kaiyong Cai The organizers do not plan to publish proceedings for this symposium. Selected papers presented at this symposium will be invited as regular submissions (full peer-review process) to the „Advanced Biomaterials” section of the international scientific journal “Advanced Engineering Materials” by Wiley-VCH. The deadline for on-line manuscript submission via http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/adbi is 15 October 2010.

Nanoparticles, peptides and cells; some insights into the bionano interface –

This poster (pdf, 5.1MB) was presented at the biennal BBSRC Fellows conference this September. It is an overview of the research activities in the group.

BBSRC Press Release: New discovery reveals fate of nanoparticles in human cells

Today’s edition of ACS Nano includes our article on the fate of nanoparticles upon internalization in live cells. BBSRC has issued a Media release. Surely it won’t get this kind of coverage…

In the image below, the top section shows nanoparticles in a compartment called endosome in a cell (Transmission Electron Microscopy, fixed cells) while the bottom part is an overlay of bright field microscopy (grey) and photothermal microscopy (yellow-red). The photothermal microscopy allows the direct visualisation of the gold nanoparticles inside the cells. The cartoon on the right is a 3D representation of the enzyme cathepsin L (with a carefully chosen set of colours).

Nanoparticles degraded by proteases upon cell uptake

ACS Nano publishes today online the result of a collaborative work with Violaine Sée, also BBSRC Fellow at the University of Liverpool (picture). The paper is entitled “Cathepsin L Digestion of Nanobioconjugates upon Endocytosis“

More comments on the significance of this paper soon.

Nanoparticles 2009

The group will be well represented at this international conference taking place in… Liverpool! I will present an oral contribution; Paul, Umbreen, Yann and Chris will present posters. You can still register with early bird fees until the end of this week.

Update: Nicolas will present a poster too!