Lisa's Lab Book

I am lecturing this term on our Gastrointestinal System Module. Lots and lots of lovely biochemistry for our students to discover, learn and for me to teach! Many, many enzymes - and this is where our students learn about the details of enzyme action, regulation and how to measure or assay enzymes. Again, this year I was preparing for the task of explaining and deriving the Michaelis-Menton equation. This equation forms the basics of enzyme kinetics and is useful to understand. In my wanderings about the internet to see if I could find a number of different ways to present this overarching equation I suddenly found myself looking at the picture below - Maud Leonora Menton. I read on, and I encourage you to do the same. That an individual who came from an ordinary background could have made such a huge contribution to science at that time is impressive, how she did this as a woman is testament to the thirst for scientific knowledge that can exist within a person.  Her work incl

Long, long life science blog covered our work on Carbonic anhydrase, I wanted to share this with you - click on the link below. http://www.longlonglife.org/en/longevity/lifespan-news/carbonic-anhydrase-protein-controlling-aging/

Our new laboratory friend - the Loligo A really important measure of mitochondrial health is oxygen consumption of a cell or tissue or in our case the nematode worm. We were fortunate to receive funding from Alzheimer's Research UK and the University of Nottingham SVMS to purchase an oxygen electrode array. Our first experiment gave us a real insight into some knock-down worm experiments and I was so excited I decided to take a video of the machine as it 'disco' flashed it's way through the measurement time.

Congratulations Tom on a great presentation!

Biology of Aging - Gordon Conference In July thanks to funding from Alzheimer's Research UK I attended this conference, see if you can spot me in the photograph above. A few days of excellent science and the chance to meet and talk in depth with scientists all thinking about Aging (of course we are all 'doing' aging too!). I met some great people and listened to some outstanding talks. Steve Horvath, Cynthia Kenyon, Vera Gorbonova, Jadwiga Giebultowicz and others all gave inspirational and thought provoking presentations of their work and ideas. The conference was organised well in the Alpine village of Les Diablerets (The Little Devils). We enjoyed some long walks in the sun, dodging most of the thundery rain showers, along the rivers and and streams in the company of Swiss mountains and their associated cattle. Later in the same week a couple who went missing 70 years ago emerged perfectly preserved in the ice from the glacier near this village -

Apologies for the radi o silence. I haven't posted for a while even though we are as busy as ever!  I have been encountering some technical problems with updating the blog. I am hoping to fix the issues today so check back soon and there should be some new content.

Great evening at Pint of Science! Brilliant interested audience, so much fun!

This week on Tuesday at The Canal House Nottingham Brainergetics What happens to us as we grow older? At some point do our bodies just run out of energy? Our research is looking at this question. We are comparing the energy producing parts of the brain ‘the mitochondria’ from healthy young and old and diseases connected with advanced age. To help us understand how we might extend the energetic lifespan of our brains we are examining Pipistrelle bat mitochondria. Bats live far longer than their body size and metabolic rate predict, they are ‘exceptionally long-lived’ mammals. Our ultimate aim is to keep the brain running on full batteries until the end.  

Nottingham 2017   This year I am speaking in the session ' The Ageing Brain '  

An advanced online version of our latest paper - published this week in Aging