Recent News

Helen’s hard work has paid off with her first first-author publication ‘Engineering conditional peptide self-assembly using AlphaFold’, featured in Cell Press. We all want to give Helen and co a huge congratulations on their publication – very well deserved.

“In the paper we explore how to use AlphaFold to predict short peptide assemblies. We established some ground rules to use when assessing prediction quality, then used AlphaFold guided rational design process to target conditional co-assembly and designed several two-component peptide systems.

I’m really excited to have my first first-author paper get published after a lot of hard work from everyone involved!” – Helen Futty

Follow the link to go give Helen’s paper a read Engineering conditional peptide self-assembly using AlphaFold: Cell Reports Physical Science , otherwise head over to our publication page to find it there.

Last week Daniel, Fin, Helen, and Tejaswini went along to the ECR symposium hosted by the University of Strathclyde. Daniel, Helen and Tejaswini each presented their work as posters, whilst Fin gave a talk.

Team red took gold again, with Fin winning a prize for his talk. Head to the publications to read a bit more about Fin’s work. Perhaps next time the rest of us should follow Fin’s fashion stance and not wear woollen jumpers – you live and learn.

If you see Fin don’t forget to congratulate him!

See if you can find the team in the group photo – hint: look for the biggest smiles.

Alex (Loch group), Dipankar, Helen and Fin took a trip down to Diamond light source (Oxon) for some SAXS. They performed in situ irradiation of light responsive polymer networks – see the picture below for the setup.

It wasn’t just about the SAXS though! The group manage to get some day time luna gazing in, otherwise known as an eclipse. Life hack – always pack tin foil and paper for your travels…..you are very welcome.

Managed to get out of the lab for some sport inspired team building. The Draper group also joined us in the action. Team red were victorious in the end, as you can probably tell from Helen and Fin’s happy faces. Here’s to many more sports days!

First place – Red team: Fin and Helen

Second place – Yellow team: Ellen, Remi and Octavia

Third place – Blue team: Lineta, Tejaswini and Hunter

Fourth place – Green team: Olivia, Rui and Daniel

PhD student of the match goes to Tejaswini for the longest unintentional penalty time during the sack race.

Dipankar and Fin took a trip to the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France recently.

Despite the blazing heat seen across mainland Europe, the lads pulled through and got to work on measuring some RheoSANS data for machine learning models.

Well done team! Now get yourselves back to Scotland and cool off.