Lisa's Lab Book

Nottingham Bright Club @Brightclubnotts They say there is a fine line between  bravery and stupidity and this week on Wednesday night I wobbled my way along that fine line, lurching from one side to the other as I performed stand-up comedy related to our research. A big shout out to all who organised this and also did a set that evening - in hindsight it was a very fun thing to do! Great venue at a favourite pub in Hockley - The Angel Microbrewery, a visit there will never feel quite the same again!

  The Nottingham Festival of Science and Curiousity is happening from the 13th-20th of February 2019 have a look at the programme As part of the festival The Bright Club Nottingham is presenting an evening of science and 'comedy' at the Angel Microbrewery on Wednesday the 20th February - guess who agreed to do an 8 minute set? I'm so not funny it's going to be hilarious!

We have a new O2K High Resolution Respirometer A huge thank-you to the University of Nottingham Research Priority Area Fund for supporting our bid for this piece of equipment! I had been eyeing up one of these for many months and there is already a long list of experiments and collaborations that are waiting to benefit from the data generated by this machine. Included with the machine is a place on a training workshop so off I went in the middle of December to Innsbruck, Austria to visit Erich Gnaiger and the team supporting MitoEAGLE . Many familiar faces and for me at last a chance to get fully immersed in three days of O2K respirometry. What a great workshop it was and while I was there my new machine was being readied for dispatch to Nottingham where we now have it on my bench in the lab. Cells are being grown and reagents assembled as we speak to get through a few test runs before we start our experiments. Innsbruck is a great city to visit and while we were there the first sno...

Gunjan Katyal is our new Vice Chancellors Research Scholar. She started her PhD on mitochondrial haemoglobin at the begining of October 2018. Gunjan is from India and is taking up a post as resident tutor at University Park Nottingham. We are very excited to have her on board - here she is in front of lab A49, the lab where she will be spending much of the next three years in! In other news we had our second International Collaboration Fund meeting in October. Dr. Chiara Papetti (University of Padua, Italy) and Dr. Magnus Lucassen (Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany) both came to Nottingham this time. Several days of research discussions and planning were accomplished - it was an absolute pleasure to have them and to wallow in research talk and ideas with them. Dr. Reinhard Stoger, Dr. Andrew McColl and Dr. Sharon Egan joined us at various points to talk about epigenetics, sticklebacks and other fish!The whole time was so absorbing I didn't manage to remember to take a single ph...

Soapbox Science in Grantham  Last weekend I was standing on a box in a shopping centre in Grantham, talking to shoppers, passers by about 'The Ageing Brain'. You can see the very small people were more interested in the battery operated fluffy rabbit toys I'd taken along, others were interested in the rubbery bats and luckily there were many others who were curious about our research approaches to finding out how the brain ages. It was a really fun time - but exhausting due to the huge variety of questions! I definitely had to use all my powers of thinking on my feet! The sun shone in through the glass roof and I think by the point this picture was taken I was in full 'mad scientist' mode. I totally loved it though - there is nothing like seeing the interest of the general public to reinforce that we we do is worthwhile.

The path to Jurmala Beach Sunset over the Baltic Sea  From the 18th to the 21st September I attended the Mitochondrial Physiology meeting in Latvia. Having never travelled to a Baltic country before I was excited to see what Riga was like. Like the best meetings the days were filled with interesting talks - all about mitochondria. There were lots of good discussions between the talks and excellent food and arrangements throughout. The beach was five minutes from the hotel along a path through the pine trees. The weather was unusually hot making a swim in the sea compulsory. A midday visit to The Great Kemeri Bog highlighted the incredible natural landscapes in this part of the World. A couple of good potential collaborations were formed during the meeting and hopefully if they come to fruition you will hear about them in the future! From the viewing tower at the Great Kemeri Bog.

This month we visited the Research Complex at Harwell We have been joined this summer by a couple of new faces. Brad Poulter who is an undergraduate in the School of Life Sciences won a summer studentship funded by the BBSRC to work with us on our mitochondrial haemoglobin project. Sam Mackenzie is joining us for a few days of work experience, he is currently studying at Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College. We set off from Sutton Bonington with Tom at the wheel to get to Harwell for about 11am. A lot of motorway was accompanied by 80's tunes from somebody's collection (not mine, though I found I knew the words to most of the songs!). In front of the synchotron at Diamond Light Source, Left to roght -Tom, Brad and Sam The 'guts' of an electron microscope We got a tour around the facility by Dave Scott and then of the electron microscopy facility by Peijun Zhang. It was very exciting to see the facilities that we may be able to use for our resea...