6-9th April was spent at the University of Cambridge attending the British Society for Parasitology annual meeting, including the Tryp-Leish symposium. Thanks to Mark Field (and colleagues) for organising a great meeting – his final act in Cambridge before packing up his lab and moving to the University of…
Don’t panic, the zombies aren’t here yet, just a great way to get year 7 students interested in infection biology!
University College School in Hampstead ran a themed science week for year 7 (11-12 year olds) entitled, ‘Zombie Apocalypse’. Professor John Kelly and I spoke to the…
A belated update:
Dr Rachel Currier joined the lab on August 19th to work on the project outlined below. Rachel has a diverse background in molecular parasitology and snake venom biology, including high-throughput approaches, gained during MSc and PhD study at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
There is…
Receptor mediated endocytosis for drug delivery in African trypanosomes: fulfilling Paul Ehrlich’s vision of chemotherapy
(featured on the front cover of the May 2013 edition of Trends in Parasitology)
A lot of time is spent identifying candidate drug targets and then designing inhibitors to block their function in the…
The 5th Kinetoplastid Molecular Cell Biology meeting in Woods Hole MA kicks off on the 21st April, and I’m going to be speaking about some of the findings from our latest RNAi library screen.
Inhibition of Trypanosoma brucei cathepsin-L increases sensitivity to lysis by human serum.
Human serum…
Genetic dissection of drug resistance in trypanosomes | Full Text
Part of a special edition of Parasitology, 140(12): Genetic and genomic approaches to understanding drug resistance in parasites (October, 2013).
Our understanding of the routes to drug resistance in trypanosomes, as well as our ability to dissect the modes of…
Article peer review is an important part of our role as scientists, provided free of charge to scientific publishers, and a necessary (though not infallible) quality control on the published record.
Clearly, the vast majority of editors and pubishers appreciate the contributions of academics to this process. However, there’s…
The MRC have recently agreed to fund a three year project in the lab investigating human serum efficacy determinants in Trypanosoma brucei, specifically looking at intracellular transport and activation of the lytic factor(s). This will employ a similar approach to that used to identify the efficacy determinants of the…
We’ve always needed to be able to justify our chosen area of research, and this is particularly the case in current times when funding is so hard to come by. This question is also pertinent given the recent successes achieved in controlling Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT) by numerous NGOs…
Thanks to Bill Wickstead for inviting me to give a talk as part of the Nottingham University School of Biology seminar series (17/10/2012). I spoke about High throughput genetic analysis in Trypanosoma brucei – deciphering trypanosome biology; an all encompassing title, but RNAi library screens access so many different…
