Poster prize for Leicester research student
Plasmodium in human blood (image: Wikipedia)
Congratulations to Kathryn Pugh, currently studying for a PhD in our Department of Chemistry, who won a poster prize at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Organic Chemistry Midlands Section Meeting.
Kathryn was one of 15 postgraduate students from Leicester who presented their work at the meeting, held last week at the University of Warwick. Her prize-winning poster was entitled titled ‘An Integrated Chemical-biological Approach to Unravelling Malaria Cell Signalling Pathways’. (It was discovered last year that chemotherapy drugs used to treat cancer patients can also be used in the treatment of malaria because the organism which causes the disease, Plasmodium, hijacks host enzymes rather than using its own.)
In addition, Dr Robert Britton from the Department gave a presentation on his current research on ‘Affinity chromatography and LC-MS/MS: Identification of protein targets of resveratrol.’
MS is mass spectrometry and LC is liquid chromatography. Resveratrol is a phenol compound, produced by some plants in response to bacterial or fungal attack, which is known to have benefits in the prevention of both cancer and cardiovascular disease. It’s the basis of all those newspaper stories about ‘drinking red wine is good for you’.
