Meet the robot avatars helping Cambridge students combine education and motherhood

sjr81 — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 08:55:23 +0000

Neeta Lakhani and another fellow student are NHS professionals, full-time mothers and part-time students who fell pregnant and gave birth to their children while studying for the Genomic Medicine Masters Programme. Cambridge is believed to be the first university to have used the avatars for classroom teaching.

Using the avatars, which were originally designed to help schoolchildren with long-term illnesses continue their studies, both Neeta and her classmate were able to carry on (virtually) attending their classes in a more profound and engaging way than simply viewing a livestream of the lectures they were missing, or using platforms such as Skype.

̽��ֱ��avatars have microphones, speakers and can move their heads to view both teachers, classmates and presentations – enabling the students to listen, ask questions, talk and interact with classmates and supervisors both during lectures and at breaks.

If the babies are crying, then both mothers can mute the microphones at home so as not to disturb the classroom environment. If they wish to ask a question in class, they can activate a flashing light on the avatar to signal their wish to speak.

Neeta, who alongside her daughter Aniya was filmed for Channel Four News, said: “ ̽��ֱ��way we do it is that that we all get up as we normally do and I get Aniya set up and I get the avatar set up on this end and she just goes through the module with me every day. Whenever she needs attention, I’m able to give it to her without disrupting the class by putting the avatar on silent from my end, but still being able to hear. As soon as she’s settled, I’m able to go back to the avatar.

“I’ve actually found that I’ve concentrated more being at home because it gives me the opportunity to be able to do the two things that I needed to do in the environment that I can most easily do it in. Obviously, the alternative would have been to be in Cambridge and her not be there and I think that would have been very distracting.”

Sarah Morgan, Scientific Training Coordinator at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), said: “This was a bit of an experiment for us, but I would say it’s a successful one. ̽��ֱ��robot avatars allowed the two students to participate without physically being in the room. Using the avatars allowed the students to continue their training while caring for their new-borns. It’s certainly inspired us to think outside the box in terms of the needs of our students.”

̽��ֱ��Genomics Medicine Masters Programme is a joint Institute of Continuing Education (ICE) and School of Clinical Medicine course for the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, delivered in collaboration with EMBL-EBI, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and the Wellcome Genome Campus Advanced Courses and Scientific Conferences.

They are 40cm tall, made of white plastic, and don’t look like your average students, but robot avatars have taken their place in the classroom at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� – to help two mothers with new-born babies continue their Masters degrees in Genomic Medicine.

I get the avatar set up and my daughter goes through the module with me every day.

Neeta Lakhani

Meet the robot avatars helping Cambridge students combine education and motherhood

European Bioinformatics Institute

̽��ֱ��two student avatars pictured outside the Wellcome Genome Campus

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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̽��ֱ��periodic table of proteins

sc604 — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 19:00:00 +0000

A new ‘periodic table’ of protein complexes, devised by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, provides a unified way to classify and visualise protein complexes, which drive a huge range of biological processes, from DNA replication to catalysing metabolic reactions.

̽��ֱ��table, published in the journal Science, offers a new way of looking at almost all known molecular structures and predicting how new ones could be made, providing a valuable tool for research into evolution and protein engineering.

By using the table, researchers are able predict the likely forms of protein complexes with unknown structure, estimate the feasibility of entirely new structures, and identify possible errors in existing structural databases. It was created by an interdisciplinary team led by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Wellcome Genome Campus.

Almost every biological process depends on proteins interacting and assembling into complexes in a specific way, and many diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are associated with problems in complex assembly. ̽��ֱ��principles underpinning this organisation are not yet fully understood, but the new periodic table presents a systematic, ordered view on protein assembly, providing a visual tool for understanding biological function.

“We’re bringing a lot of order into the messy world of protein complexes,” said the paper’s lead author Sebastian Ahnert of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, a physicist who regularly tangles with biological problems. “Proteins can keep combining in these simple ways, adding more and more levels of complexity and resulting in a huge variety of structures. What we’ve made is a classification based on underlying principles that helps people get a handle on the complexity.”

̽��ֱ��exceptions to the rule are interesting in their own right, added Ahnert, and are the subject of continuing studies.

“Evolution has given rise to a huge variety of protein complexes, and it can seem a bit chaotic,” said study co-author Joe Marsh, formerly of the Wellcome Genome Campus and now of the MRC Human Genetics Unit at the ̽��ֱ�� of Edinburgh. “But if you break down the steps proteins take to become complexes, there are some basic rules that can explain almost all of the assemblies people have observed so far.”

Ballroom dancing can be seen as an endless combination of riffs on the waltz, fox trot and cha-cha. Similarly, the ‘dance’ of protein complex assembly can be seen as endless variations on dimerization (one doubles, and becomes two), cyclisation (one forms a ring of three or more) and subunit addition (two different proteins bind to each other). Because these happen in a fairly predictable way, it’s not as hard as you might think to predict how a novel protein would form.

Some protein complexes, called homomers, feature multiple copies of a single protein, while others, called heteromers, are made from several different types of proteins. ̽��ֱ��table shows that there is a very close relationship between the possible structures of heteromers and homomers. In fact, the vast majority of heteromers can be thought of as homomers in which the single protein is replaced by a repeated unit of several proteins. ̽��ֱ��table was constructed using computational analysis of a large database of protein-protein interfaces.

“By analysing the tens of thousands of protein complexes for which three-dimensional structures have already been experimentally determined, we could see repeating patterns in the assembly transitions that occur – and with new data from mass spectrometry we could start to see the bigger picture,” said Walsh.

“ ̽��ֱ��core work for this study is in theoretical physics and computational biology, but it couldn’t have been done without the mass spectrometry work by our colleagues at Oxford ̽��ֱ��,” said Sarah Teichmann, Research Group Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “This is yet another excellent example of how extremely valuable interdisciplinary research can be.”

Reference:
Ahnert SE, et. al. ‘Principles of assembly reveal a periodic table of protein complexes.’ Science (2015). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa2245

Adapted from an EMBL-EBI press release.

Researchers have devised a periodic table of protein complexes, making it easier to visualise, understand and predict how proteins combine to drive biological processes.

We’re bringing a lot of order into the messy world of protein complexes

Sebastian Ahnert

Spencer Phillips, EMBL-EBI

̽��ֱ��periodic table of proteins

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Wellcome Genome Campus

Meet the robot avatars helping Cambridge students combine education and motherhood

Meet the robot avatars helping Cambridge students combine education and motherhood

̽��ֱ��periodic table of proteins