News
Where have our EPSRC Fellows gone?
Matt Baker
Currently I am working at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston as part of my EPSRC fellowship on “Spectroscopic and Spectrometric Molecular Pathology and Diagnosis”. The criteria of the fellowship allow you to spend research periods at foreign institutions to forward your research, learn from experts in your area, make valuable contacts and experience different research cultures.
I have just moved to Boston from Berlin where I used vibrational spectroscopy to study cancerous cell, progenitor cells and tissue in order to help the diagnosis of prostate cancer and shed light on the disease. In Boston I will be using a method called multi-isotope imaging mass spectrometry, which can take high resolution (approx 35 nm) mass spectral images. I will be performing experiments to understand the fundamentals of this technique as well as analyzing cancerous and non-cancerous prostate cell lines and the sub-cellular compartments of these cells.
Sarah Hart
Why I am visiting UCSF Mass Spectrometry Facility? The National Mass Spectrometry Facility at the University of California, San Francisco has longstanding expertise in the analysis of unusual post-translational modifications and in the development of proteome database searching algorithms for unbiased interpretation of tandem mass spectrometric data. I am working with the team here, using high-resolution mass spectrometry equipment (hybrid linear ion traps coupled to either orbitrap or ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometers), to investigate the occurrence of peptides in urine samples obtained from women during pregnancy. If I can develop a robust analytical method, which enables rapid and sensitive identification of these peptides, this method will be used to find diagnostic markers in the context of pre-eclampsia, a disorder of pregnancy. I am also working on intact proteins, which is very challenging indeed. I plan to return to Manchester in August/September, with a small but significant dataset and methodology.
Aside from the excellent facilities afforded by the Mass Spectrometry Facility, UCSF is an internationally-recognized centre of excellence in biomedicine, has three Nobel laureates on its faculty, and, earthquakes withstanding, is in one of the nicest cities I've had the fortune to visit.
Lu Shin Wong
Recently, the demonstration of protein microarray applications has offered a tantalising glimpse as to their potential for massively parallelised proteomics screening. In the search for ever increasing levels of throughput from ever smaller sample sizes there has been a drive towards increasing miniaturisation, leading towards the notion of protein "nanoarrays". However, the development of such nanometre-scale arrays will require the harnessing and combination of new technologies to enable the fabrica
tion of arrays in this size regime. Thus, my research fellowship is aimed at the application of two nanofabrication methods, scanning near-field photolithography (SNP) and dip-pen nanolithography (DPN), together with elements of surface chemistry and molecular biology towards the development of such nanoarrays. To this end, my fellowship entails travelling to Northwestern University where I hope to learn and apply DPN towards my research. There, I will be working with Prof. Chad Mirkin, an internationally recognised nanotechnologist and the inventor of DPN. Closer to home, I have also been travelling regularly to the University of Sheffield where I continue to work closely with Prof. Graham Leggett, the inventor of SNP and currently the only group in the world who are developing applications for this technique.