Dr Purba Mukherjee and Dr Stuart Higgins This week we're hosting two of our newest YBRI Members.

Event details

Abstracts

Dr Purba Mukherjee (Chemistry) - EPSRC Open Fellow, YSBL

Polymerases for synthesis
Nucleic acids are at the forefront of therapeutic interventions, placing greater demands on chemical processes for their synthesis. New ways are needed to introduce different modalities into nucleic acids while accomplishing stereospecificity of products, improvements to scale and enhance process efficiency. We are interested in building an enzymes-only toolbox made of nucleic acids modifying enzymes that when combined can introduce novel capabilities forming an array of diverse oligonucleotide products. In this context, I will show biochemical and mechanistic data of a protein-primed DNA polymerase and a putative terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase.

Dr Stuart Higgins (PET) - UKRI Future Leaders Fellow / Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering

Building an interdisciplinary bioelectronics/bioelectricity lab - upcoming research goals and opportunities

In this talk I will share progress in building up the Complex Interface Team, an interdisciplinary research group based in the School of Physics, Engineering and Technology, and talk about our first research goals and future aims. We are aiming to fabricate bioelectronic interfaces, primarily by combining inorganic electronic interfaces with electron- and ion-conducting organic bioelectronic materials (conjugated polymers, etc). The goal is to have cellular-resolution spatial control over local fields, direct charge injection and media ion concentrations - and to use this platform to interrogate a wide-range of biological systems. I'll talk about the challenges and opportunities of bridging disciplines, and share our goals with the YBRI community, with the aim of understanding where collaborative opportunities exist.