Letters from Berlin - 4

So this final week has been even busier than the last, but it was broken up nicely by the amazing German 7-1 win against Brazil! There are no words to describe how much fun it was to get to watch it here in Berlin and we will be rooting for them in the final back in England!

Trying to wrap up all the projects by the end of the week has been difficult but we have both finished on a high note getting the results we were anticipating, and have now passed the reins onto the rest of the team.

Yesterday we presented these results to our lab team and discussed what direction the projects should go next after we have left, this was also acompanied by a lovely lunch out in the sun to say our thanks and goodbyes.

Tomorrow our flight leaves in the early hours of the morning, meaning a very painful start at 3am!

It has been an incredible experience and we were very lucky to have the opportunity to come here and would definitely recommend Berlin to anyone who is thinking about working in a lab abroad.

Lucy & Nick

Letters from Berlin - 3

Week 3 has been a busy one in the lab, with us working the previous weekend to finalise results (its OK, we still got to enjoy the sun).

Lots of PCRs and gel electrophoresis occurred with the badger and the mastomys PCRs finally being finished and sent for sequencing.The mastomys sequence returned unexpected results, so in the final week we will investigate whether wild mastomys show similar results. The sequencing for the badger viruses is also nearing completion. The initial results look promising, with other sequence yet to be returned to confirm these results.

We also had a good weekend in the sun in Berlin, with temperatures being about 30 degrees for most of the weekend, enabling us to watch the world cup in an amazing atmosphere amongst the crowd at the public open air viewing in tiergarten. We also got to visit the aquarium and chocolate factory, a last weekend well spent!

Our last week will be spent getting the final results to finish our projects and presenting these results to our lab team, as well as going out for a group meal with our lab to thank them for our time here.

Nick & Lucy

Letters from Berlin - 2

Week 2 in Berlin was kicked off with heavy rain all weekend, but that's OK. It reminds us of home! We spent the weekend continuing on our tourist exploration and visited sites such as Check Point Charlie and the DDR museum.

The entire week and no doubt the weeks to come have also held a buzzing atmosphere wherever we go due to Germany's success in the World Cup!

The week in the lab has been exciting; all our training has been completed allowing us to carry out experiments on our own, although our great lab team are still around to help us if we have any queries.

With the research projects full underway we have weekly goals set to try and get the most out of our 4 weeks here, this includes Nick and I splitting off onto 2 separate projects -  Nick studying further the Polyoma Viruses in badgers and I investigating the presence of herpesviruses in multiple organs of Mastomys (a rodent reservoir for the dangerous Lassa virus).

Once our week's research has been completed (and we're confident it will be), we will discuss with our supervisors Bernhard and Michael the best course of action for the next week depending on our results.

Lucy & Nick

Letters from Berlin

First news from our students working in Berlin (see last blog entry)!

We arrived in Berlin to discover that Gatwick had lost my (Lucy) suitcase along the way, probably flying for a nice holiday in the Bahamas or somewhere sunny. So I was without a suitcase for 3 days but after fighting through a few language barriers, it finally got delivered straight to the Robert-Koch institute. We spent the weekend exploring Berlin with Michael Jarvis (our supervisor at Plymouth), going to flea markets and hitting the tourist spots during a 12mile walk led briskly by Michael, which was rewarded with a traditional German beer. 

We started our work in the Lab on Monday led by Bernhard Ehlers and his team, Connie and Sonja, who fortunately speak excellent English to conteract our appalling German (although we are learning). 

The week has been spent learning the variations of techniques in PCR, Gel electrophoresis and Sequencing in this lab in comparison to Plymouth University. One of the huge differences is that PCR is not carried out in one lab, it is separated into a one way system of different labs for each step in PCR to avoid contamination.

The week successfully ended on us getting desired results from our first PCR and Gel electrophoresis searching for herpesviruses in badger samples - meaning we weren't kicked out of Berlin, as joked about (hopefully) by Michael and Bernhard, allowing us to continue in the next stages of our research, looking into variations on the virus as well as looking for herpesviruses within Mastomys samples.

Lucy and Nick (below)

Undergrad students to work in Germany

As an exciting beginning to the exchange of undergraduate students between University of Plymouth (UoP) and the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin, two students from the School of Biomedical and Healthcare Sciences (SoBHS) will be spending the Summer at the RKI in the laboratory of Dr Bernhard Ehlers. Based on an established collaborative interaction between Drs Jarvis (UoP) and Ehlers (RKI), Nicholas Lyons and Lucy Davison will be using state-of-the-art molecular techniques to search for viruses in European Badgers. This is a continuation of the research they did for their third year projects supervised by Dr Jarvis.

Klenerman Seminar

Next Wednesday, Professor Paul Klenerman will be coming from Oxford to talk about his work on the immune responses to hepatitis C virus (which is a major cause of liver disease globally). The virus can be controlled by natural immunity although typically viral evasion strategies lead to persistence. He will describe attempts to characterise the successful immune response and reproduce this using a vaccine, as well as some quite unexpected features of immune responses in the liver. You can find more information on Paul's work here. All welcome.
Wednesday 28th May, Plymouth Lecture Theatre, Portland Square, 1:00pm

Students planning their Nobel Sessions for new academic year

Here at Plymouth in the Biological Sciences and Biomedical & Healthcare Sciences Schools, we have a vibrant postgraduate student community that organises a variety of talks, discussions and events both inside and outside the university.

Every other week starting from 16th October 2014 there will lunchtime sessions (1-2pm) (free cake and tea provided) covering a wide variety of topics from speakers including undergraduates to PhD students and post-docs. The aims of the sessions are to broaden understanding of The Nobel Prize winning research, which underpins so many of the technologies, medicines and discoveries that we rely on in everyday life (see the Nobel Prize website for more information). The sessions also provide a platform for students to practice their presentation skills in a relaxed, friendly atmosphere and improve their science communication. Moreover, attending and presenting at these sessions looks good on your CV and may make the difference in that next job interview!!

Outside of university we also run annual ‘Science in the News explained’ evening sessions during Science Week (blog) which are aimed at the public and held at the nearby Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery. In addition to this we have also contributed to an S-factor (S for Science) event in a local secondary school, where several students presented Nobel Prize winning research. A panel of 'experts' (staff and pupils) and the pupil audience then questioned the speakers, and the audience voted for the most important discovery (more details are on another School Blog). For their efforts the presenters were kindly awarded a year’s subscription to Nature magazine.

To find out where and when our talks are held please visit our University or Facebook page for more information. If you would like to get involved by attending or presenting please don’t hesitate to contact Rebekah Simpson (rebekah.simpson@plymouth.ac.uk) or Kirsty Lloyd (kirsty.lloyd@plymouth.ac.uk).