Every year we welcome undergraduate and masters’ students with a variety of backgrounds to undertake a research project in our lab. What was your project about and what did it involve? I was characterising the structure of kinetoplast DNA (a large network of interconnected DNA minicircles using atomic force microscopy and novel image analysis procedures. The project therefore had an even split of lab time, working on the Bruker Icon AFM, and programming, which built upon the TopoStats software. What did you learn from your time in the lab? I learnt a whole range of skills, both within the lab ..read more

In March, the team visited the quaint city of Durham and attended the AFM & SPM Meeting 2024. We started the exciting week off with a graduate school where we gained hands on experience on AFMs from various companies, a brilliant way to gain insight on the capabilities and advancements in AFM technology, in addition to lectures on the statistics for data analysis. The main conference revolved around AFM and SPM, covering a wide range of topics in Life and Biological Sciences, Materials Sciences and Energy, and Hardware, Software and Data Analysis.  During the session on Life and Biolo ..read more

In March, Max visited the Rocky Mountains of Banff national park to attend the 2024: The Crossroads of Topology, Combinatorics and Biosciences: Deciphering the Entanglement of Multi-Stranded Nucleic Acids workshop Max giving his presentation on new image analysis methods to characterise DNA Topology Set within the heart of the Banff national park, this 5-day conference brought together researchers from a range of fields to remove our blinders and open our eyes to the multitude of research attacking the same topological problems from various angles. From hardcore mathematical modellers develop ..read more

In January 2024, the lab attended the Bruker UK SPM/AFM Users Meeting 2024. It was a privilege to attend the event which was held at the Henry Royce Institute in Manchester. The days were split into two with demonstrations of incredible microscope technology in the morning followed by an afternoon of fascinating, frontier pushing science. As single molecule, bio-AFM users it was particularly interesting to hear about developments in other SPM technologies. For example, AFM-IR which allows the operator to gather information about their sample surface as well as infrared spectra helping identify ..read more

In September, Max, Libby, Eddie, Tom, and Alice visited the picturesque Swiss village of Villars-sur-Ollon to attend the 2023 EMBO DNA topology and topoisomerases in genome dynamics workshop.  Set against the beautiful backdrop of the Alps, we first attended an LS2 ECR satellite event (chaired by Alice) where Eddie, Libby, Max and Tom all gave a 5 minute flash talk introducing their research. This event also gave us all an opportunity to present our research and network with our fellow ECRs while getting to know the scenic setting for the conference.  Max speaking at the ECR satelli ..read more

We are starting off 2024 with the exciting news that we have an open PDRA position in our group, fully funded by Alice’s UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. This position would suit someone with an interest in single molecule microscopy, (bio)image analysis, DNA biophysics or therapeutic development. Everyone is looking for great postdocs at the moment, so here's a little on who we are, who we're looking for and what I think we can offer: We are a really close group, united by interests in open science, microscopy, DNA structure and bioimage analysis. We work together as a group and with amazi ..read more

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