Lisa's Lab Book

I do like updating my blog but it is a real battle to decide how much of me to put out there (or here in this case). There are some great scientific and academic blogs out there, the serious ones and more and more those that allow us to laugh about the challenges we face as Research and Teaching staff. The endless conflict of time share between one and the other - and for me, and others the teaching of subjects that aren't within my research expertise. We can each write a blog that makes everything look shiny but there is another side. Imposter syndrome. The complex triangle of publishing, networking and funding. So many things that are systematically wrong yet appear impossible to fix. Teaching is hard and though we are trained to evaluate and give feedback our students are not. Yet student evaluation is embedded into our appraisal mechanism. This despite it being shown that students are more likely to give higher ratings to males or  to the 'likeable/popular' teachers. ...

Inter professional Masterclass Tickets

‘I decided I don’t mind being old. It’s relaxing.’   A brilliant quote from my most excellent friend VH.  I still can’t work out why the spelling of this word is different on the east versus the west of the Atlantic Ocean....anyway.... There are so many advantages to becoming older, and our societies should be keen to exploit the benefits as our populations skew to reach the bigger birthdays. Maybe the Queen will have to raise the age at which a birthday message is received, as many more people reach their 100 th year. Of course our work is principally to do with how the body changes as we age, but is it correct to define everything we see as different as potentially detrimental? When I compare an old brain mitochondrial proteome to that from a young brain is it fair to say that the proteins that are changed throughout life are necessarily associated with declining health? This week Damien Hirst spoke in theGuardian’s culture podcast about Mr. Barnes a ma...

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.