48th Meeting of the Biochemistry Department Research Society

Members of the Department came together last week for the annual Biochemistry Research Society Meeting, keen to hear what the 400-level students have been busy doing in research labs across the building this year.

The presenting Honours and Master's degree students are generally ‘newbies’ to academic research, and the meeting is an opportunity for them to tell the audience all about their successes and challenges so far.

Attendees were in for a real treat – bite-sized summaries of research projects across a smorgasbord of topics and methods, and well-crafted and presented talks. The students’ enthusiasm for their research and the community around them was infectious – it was a joy to be in the audience.

So what have the students been trying to find out?

• How to develop nanobodies to study oligomeric states of proteins.
• How eyes evolved in mussels (you’re right, they don’t have eyes, unless you’re looking at the free-living larval juveniles that have eye-spots).
• How to make it easier to understand massive amounts of genomic data using pangenomes.
• How a long non-coding RNA might impact the development of Parkinson’s disease.
• Could tweaking the way some plant proteins bind together open up a new way to improve the growth of agricultural plants?
• How a mutation in a particular gene results in a young patient with a neurodegenerative disorder.
• How exactly does the anti-cancer agent nimbolide stop the enzyme RNF114 from working at the molecular level?
• How to detect proteins that might be ‘junk’ using computation.
• How do mutations in a protein that wraps up DNA (histone H4) result in neurodevelopmental disorders?

Each research journey tale was finished off with a round of questions and enthusiastic applause. Proceedings paused half-way for an afternoon tea of home-baked goodies (brought by the students), and at the end each student was presented with their own metal laboratory measuring spatula, as per department tradition.

Thank you to all the 400-level students for sharing your research adventures with us, and best of luck as you finish off your projects.