Final year poster session

The last act for our final year students is to present their dissertation projects in the form of a poster to staff. Yesterday saw the annual poster session (see the photos below). Just a quick note to wish all of our final year students good luck in their future careers and to say how much the staff have enjoyed teaching you all!

School of Biomedical and Biological sciences to restructure

Exciting news this month from the school - it will form two new schools at the University from 1st August 2013.

School of Biomedical and Healthcare Science (In the new faculty of Medicine, Biomedicine and Dentistry) -

Head of School, Prof Neil Avent

School of Biological Sciences (In the new faculty of Science & Environment)

Head of School (To be announced)

The new school of Biomedical & Healthcare science will offer exciting new opportunities to study alongside medical and dental students, and a new health science campus at Derriford is being planned to relocate our research labs there. Our long term objectives will be to encourage our Biomedicine, Healthcare science and Human Bioscience graduates to study graduate entry medicine, a higher research degree, or career progression in the NHS or Industry. Further updates will be posted on this Blog as the school develops.

Neil Avent 150513



Eternal War in the Dark Matter of our Genome

Something out of Star Wars perhaps? Not even close - Dr Robert Belshaw, one of our new appointments in the department gives an overview of his research:

"The proteins that make up our body are coded for by less than 2% of our genome sequence. Finding out what goes on in other 98% (the so-called "Dark Matter") is one of the great challenges in genomic research.

Some of this Dark Matter is made up of regulatory elements (signals to switch our genes on and off) and the ENCODE project (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) is a big collaborative attempt to make sense of this. Other regions may be just "junk" DNA with no function, but around half of the Dark Matter is the remains of genomic parasites: pieces of DNA that copy themselves to new locations, often causing damage as they do so. Our body has a battery of defence mechanisms to fight this proliferation, which parallels the way our immune system copes with ordinary pathogens.

I have just moved to Plymouth from Oxford where I was working on a group of these genomic parasites, called endogenous retroviruses. There is a BBC report on a paper we did last year on them. One aspect of my research at Plymouth will be to investigate the possible benefits of these viruses. They are generally silenced (switched off) in our body but this control breaks down with disease, leading to viral proteins being produced in cancerous and infected cells. In theory we can stimulate our immune system to attack these cells, opening up the possibility of new treatments for cancer and HIV infection, even vaccines."

See more information and publications on Robert's web site

Human Health Sciences Brochure

Finally worked out to get files displayed on this blog - have a look at the brochure for our courses or download it.

Human Health Brochure

Systems Biology Facility

Thanks to a substantial investment in post-genomic technologies, our Systems Biology Facility is now up and running. These purpose-built labs allow us to use next generation sequencing technology and proteomics to study disease.

Lots of machines that go ping

Visit the Facility web page for lots more pictures of machines that go ping (as well as doing lots of other impressive stuff that the author of these pages pretends to understand).

Work placements and placement years

We offer our students the chance to complete a placement year between their second and third years of study and summer placements. Not only does this give extra experience and learning opportunities, it also gives a taster of the world of work within a chosen field. Over the next few weeks, I hope to be able to put up several pieces from students giving their impressions of what it is like and what they are getting out of it.

Hayley Burston (BSc Exercise, Nutrition and Health) is first up:

"In the summer of my second year studying Exercise, Nutrition and Health, I was given the opportunity to complete a work placement at the University fitness centre. Although my degree taught me a lot about nutrition, exercise and physiology, the work placement allowed these skills to be put into a practical situation, helping to further my understanding of the areas taught in my degree.

Not only did the placement solidify the information from lectures, it established an understanding of the work environment and taught me the basic practices that must be applied within the industry. Any work placement will help someone to consider their future career and this enabled me to see that I was taking the right direction.

From this placement, I have subsequently got a part-time job at the gym which allows me to continually apply my knowledge, not only benefiting my future, but also my third year studies. It has helped me to become organised with University work, a key skill for the present and future. I have already applied topics learnt from the degree by redesigning the Personal Programme Form. The independence has helped to increase my confidence in completing the degree and in situations within the fitness industry." 

Hayley at work in the University Fitness Centre

Summer Studentship Conference

Each year we offer summer bursaries to our students who are just finishing their second year. This allows them 6-8 weeks of research experience with our staff during the holidays. This all culminates in a poster conference where students present the work that they performed:



Naina being quizzed by (and having errors pointed out by) Nick



If you write Macrophage in the title, Dr Foey will be wanting to know what you did!



All of those cytokines seemed to have got to Jen

 These bursaries offer students a taster of what research is like but don't take my word for it!

Over to Naina Verma, a third year Biomed student who worked on the effect of of anti-diabetic sulfonylureas on mitochondrial activity in pancreatic beta cells with Dr Charlie Affourtit:

"What I gained from doing the summer placement was a new fascination for research which I did not entirely experience during the occasional practical sessions taken during the term period.  For the lab research my supervisor had given me a question which I had to do my research on.  Your enthusiasm builds so much for the work you do because it becomes your own project, you learn from any errors you make and become so eager find a reliable answer to your proposed question.  I liked independent study and I also understood the importance of searching a wide array of scientific papers to aid my research.  I developed an understanding of using scientific papers to support the reason for why I was doing the experiment in a certain way.  Now I know how scientists in their day-to-day jobs use scientific papers to support their research.  I can confidently say that I would have not been even close to being prepared to do a third year dissertation if it was not for me doing the summer project.  A very obvious benefit i gained within these 8 weeks was learning basic techniques which is used in a lot of research such as how to culture and maintain cells using aseptic techniques and keeping the growth environment consistent.  Cell culture might seem like a very basic technique but it does take multiple attempts to become confident to do it well.  Finally an added value with doing a summer project is the chance of getting to interact with a lot of the course lecturers.  I would hopefully like to think that it has built rapport with them and that they can see your willingness to do well.  Overall, I would recommend to everyone, if you have the chance to do a summer project you definitely will not regret it."