On Saturday Alex presented his work to the Parkinson's UK Edinburgh Research Interest Group at an online engagement event. Alex gave an excellent talk and effectively used analogies to communicate complex scientific concepts to an audience comprised of individuals living with Parkinson’s and their carers. Following his talk Alex was jointly awarded the Ken Bowler Travel Bursary along with the two other speakers – congratulations Alex.

You can read more about the Parkinson's UK Edinburgh Research Interest Group here and Alex’s talk will soon be available for you to view there too.

Last week was a big milestone for our 5th year M.Chem. students, Aimee and Toria, as they submitted their dissertations. Aimee has been investigating liquid-liquid phase separation of UBQLN2 in collaboration with Luke McAlary at the University of Wollongong, Australia and Toria’s project focussed on super-resolution imaging of cytosolic TDP-43 aggregates. Huge well done to both!

The Edinburgh single-molecule biophysics group is excited to welcome post-doctoral research associates Rebecca and Ji-Eun who will be working on projects in collaboration with UCB Pharmaceuticals. Rebecca's research aims to elucidate the structure and pathogenic nature of α-synuclein aggregates, which are associated with Parkinson's disease, and Ji-Eun's work will focus on characterising tau aggregates, which are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Read more about their background and projects in the People section.

Well done to Zoe, who has passed her first year viva! Zoe's work on LIVE-PAINT impressed the panel, and we are all excited about her future work!

We have published a new approach to super-resolution imaging in live cells. Entitled "LIVE-PAINT", the method was developed in collaboration with Lynne Regan's lab in the School of Biology. LIVE-PAINT takes advantage of peptide-protein interactions; the protein-of-interest is tagged with a short peptide sequence, which has a binding partner fused to a fluorescence protein. As the fluorescent protein and peptide transiently bind, a fluorescent burst results, and this is accurately pinpointed with nanometre accuracy. Repeated binding events allow a super-resolution image to be built from this. 

Well done to Katie who has passed her first year viva!

A recent paper has been published in Cell Death and Differentiation on a mechanism of cell death caused by alpha-synuclein oligomers in Parkinson's disease. In a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, UCL, The Crick Institute, the University of Aberdeen, the University of New York, and the University of Cambridge, the paper describes how oligomers lead to lipid peroxidation, which causes cell death via ferroptosis. 

Huge congratulations to Sarah Aitken who submitted the dissertation on her work done throughout her final year at Edinburgh. Working with Mike Daniels in Barry McColl's lab, Sarah used single-molecule methods to characterise the aggregation of amyloid beta, and also looked at the response of immune cells to the toxic oligomers formed. 

On the 1st May, Mathew presented the groups research to the EASTBIO World Class Underpinning Bioscience group. Due to the isolation rules relating to the COVID-19 Pandemic, this was done via teleconferencing, and so a recording of the presentation was also made. This is accessible on this website.

Mathew recently presented the ESMB's work to the Parkinson's UK Edinburgh Research Interest Group. He was joined by Craig and Alex from the group, and also Kiani Jeacock from David Clarke's research group. The event was well-attended by those living with Parkinson's and their carers, and gave us the opportunity to talk about the strives we're making in understanding how protein aggregation occurs.