Every year we welcome undergraduate and masters’ students with a variety of backgrounds to undertake a research project in our lab. Chloe Moore completed her MRes in Translational Oncology in 2022 where she was looking at the damage caused by different forms of radiation on DNA by using AFM in the Pyne lab. What was your project about and what did it involve? My project involved comparing the different types of DNA damage/lesions induced by both gamma and alpha radiation. I did this by exposing both MDA-MB-231 cells and piAN7 plasmids to different doses of gamma radiation and alpha radiation ..read more

In March, Libby, Eddie, Max, Tom, Laura, and Alice all attended the Physics of Life conference at Harrogate Convention Centre. This was the first conference of its kind, representing science at the interface between biology and physics. During the conference there were keynote lecturers and parallel sessions covering a wide range of topics from single molecule biology to evolution, as well as two poster session and a conference dinner allowing plenty of opportunities for networking. There were many excellent talks, but the standout talks included hearing Graeme King from UCL discuss the mechan ..read more

In January Tom, Rob and Eddie went to the 2023 Bruker UK AFM user meeting in the Bragg Centre at the University of Leeds. This was the first user meeting that Bruker has run in three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over two days we were able to attend practical workshops and see demonstrations of the latest developments from Bruker’s AFM division. We also heard a great selection of talks from AFM users from across the UK working in a range of different disciplines. Highlights included hearing Ioanna Mela from Cambridge talk about how AFM can be corelated with super-resolution microscopy to ..read more

From the 5th to the 8th of September 2022, Sylvia (writing) with Neil and Bob from the Sheffield RSE team, attended RSECon2022 a conference centred around Research Software Engineering (RSE) in Frederick Douglass Centre at Newcastle University. RSECon2022 brought together, in Newcastle, people from around the world interested in developing software to support and facilitate scientific research. Talks and panels were wide ranging, from computational and programming methods to discussions on how the RSE community can be more inclusive. I found all the talks that I attended to be both very intere ..read more

For the past five years I have had the pleasure of working with Dr Isabel Bennett. Isabel has been a brilliant student, and showed as much during her viva, where she impressed her examiners, who were extremely positive about her work. I’m so grateful to both of her examiners, Til Bachmann and Carmel Curtis for making Isabel’s viva such a great experience, and a brilliant way to finish off an outstanding PhD. Isabel, I’m proud to have been part of your journey, and am excited to hear about your next chapter, I have no doubt you will go on to do (more) brilliant things ..read more

NAF 2019 at Burlington House A brilliant representation of single particle Cryo EM NAF 2019 was a brilliant meeting, organised by David Rueda, at the Royal Society of Chemistry. There were a series of brilliant talks, with highlights including: Erin Cutts, from the Vannini group (ICR) talking about her work with Condensin - Human condensin I and II drive extensive ATP–dependent compaction of nucleosome–bound DNA; Alexandra Moores, from the Kad lab, who is currently investigating the role of nucleotide excision repair in Escherichia coli using single molecule techniques; and Clément Charenton ..read more

Alice gave a sold out out talk at London’s ‘Atoms to Galaxies’ Pint of Science event. If you missed it, the abstract is below: Did you know that the DNA in each of your cells is taller than you are? You have around 2 metres of DNA packed into every cell of your body, and given that you have around 30 trillion cells in your body, that means you have enough DNA to wrap around the earth over a billion times! This DNA has to be compacted into the cell nucleus, which is only a tenth of the width of a human hair. From this highly compacted bundle, DNA is continually unravelled, read, and copied, whi ..read more

For #DNADay19 Eva Amsen has written an article discussing what how we can ‘see’ DNA, and what we can learn about its structure from ‘seeing’ it. It's exactly 66 years since the publication of the structure of DNA. What have we learned since then, and how much can we really "see" of DNA? You can read the article here ..read more

On the 10th December 2018, Kavit attended the ‘Physics of Life PoLNET2 2018 Symposium: Molecules, Mechanics, Medicine and More!’ at the University of York. The interdisciplinary symposium aimed to showcase collaborative projects across Biology and Physics with discussions ranging from evolution to epigenetics. Kavit presented a poster entitled ‘Targeting Twist’, highlighting our current research in exploring the dynamic interactions between complex topological states of DNA, such as supercoiling, and topoisomerases. This included the effect of supercoiling on DNA structure as well as insights ..read more

Following on from our pervious blog post about how Eddie transitioned from working at AFM probe manufacturer NuNano to doing a PhD in the Pyne lab, this blog post looks at the experience of Billy Davies in the lab before he made the reverse journey from Sheffield to Bristol. Billy completed a project masters project in the Pyne lab in 2021 as part of his MSc in Molecular Medicine at the University of Sheffield and now works at NuNano in Bristol as a probe consultant. Billy Davies is now a Probe Consultant for NuNano What was your project about and what did it involve? My project studied how D ..read more