Lisa's Lab Book

New Year – Old Me? The changing of the calendar to 2018 causes many inner observations, successes and failures of the past year. Good and ‘ prefer not to admit to ’ habits that need management in the future weeks and months. ‘Old me’ could refer to the continuous process of ageing that doubtless needs some consideration, or perhaps a previous version of me that now needs another outing. Which is it? Colwick Parkrun 1st January 2018 -  thanks to Andrew Philips for posting so many photos of the event. It’s a couple of years now since I took the decision to start cycling to work. The habit is a good one and has become my usual method of commuting, eleven or so miles each way through rolling English countryside. I love it and now depend upon it for thinking time and exercise - I blogged about it previously when I got my new bicycle. However, my previous good habit of running has gradually given way to the bicycle commute. This was not intentional but rather a natural taper...

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 ...

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.