New PhD opportunity in collaboration with ELE lab

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South West Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership

The Lloyd-Evans lab is very pleased to advertise their involvement in a PhD project on offer at Cardiff University with Dr. Barend de Graaf (primary supervisor). The project aims to investigate the potential role of endocytosis in regulating communication between the growing pollen tube and the surrounding pistil tissue. The ELE lab will assist with organelle purification (using their cutting edge magnetic separation technology), microscopy and Ca2+ imaging. Applications for the project are welcomed until the closing date on December 5th, 2016. For further details please visit:

https://www.findaphd.com/search/PhDDetails.aspx?CAID=859&LID=33

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/swbio/projects_available/agriculture.html

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/swbio/media/swbio-dtp-project-12.pdf

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/81147-de-graaf-barend-hj

Cardiff School of Biosciences gains Silver Athena Swan award

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Great news that last week the School of Biosciences obtained a silver award for it’s role in promoting gender equality in the workplace and improving the working environment for all staff. Credit goes to Matt Smalley and Ros John for all their hard work in writing the application. Will be a tough act for myself and Emma Blain to follow as the next co-chairs! An outstanding achievement and a very important step forward for the School. For more information about the Athena Swan charter, see:

http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/athena-swan/

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Lloyd-Evans lab at NCL2016

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A very busy meeting here in Boston with a lot of exciting science in the areas where we are working (particularly CLN3 and CLN5). My talk on Ca2+ homeostasis in CLN3 has gone down very well and Luke and Katie’s posters (CLN3 and CLN5) are getting a lot of attention. Have managed to catch up with colleagues and our funders and there has been some excellent research on display. Looking forward now to the duck boat trip!

Update! Katie was selected for one of the three poster talks and gave an excellent presentation on the last morning of the conference on her BDFA and Battle Batten funded CLN5 work. It’s been a great conference, looking forward already to NCL2018 in London!

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Welcome back Rafa (as a PhD student!)

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img_8228The lab would all like to welcome back Rafa who is re-joining us as a PhD student following his extremely successful MRes project on Huntington’s disease. Rafa will be moving away from HD for his PhD studies and will now be working on CLN8 disease, one of the neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses. The aim of his project is to phenotype cells from this disease in order to develop novel pharmaceutical screening assays for drug discovery.  We hope that this work will not only be useful for CLN8 disease but also for other NCLs and lysosomal diseases. Welcome back Rafa and all the best for the next 3-4 years!

This PhD project was made possible by funds from the Batten Disease Family Association and the Life Sciences Research Network Wales:

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BDFA

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LSRNW

We are very grateful for your support!

Succesful ARUK pump-priming funding application

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I am pleased to announce that our application for a small grant from the local Cardiff Uni ARUK pump-priming round was successful! We applied for funds to support a new 20x Fluar objective and lysosensor yellow/blue ratiometric imaging filters (from Cairn and Chroma) for our Zeiss Colibri microscope. These upgrades will significantly improve our productivity as our current higher magnification objectives restrict the number of cells we can image during Ca2+ experiments. We are very grateful to the committee for their support of this application and ARUK for their continued support of the Alzheimer’s research in our lab.