̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Clemens Kaminski

Major investment in doctoral training announced

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 14:23:55 +0000

̽��ֱ��65 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) will support leading research in areas of national importance, including net zero, AI, defence and security, healthcare and quantum technologies. ̽��ֱ��£1 billion in funding – from government, universities and industry – represents the UK’s biggest-ever investment in engineering and physical sciences doctoral skills.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will lead two of the CDTs and is a partner in a further five CDTs. ̽��ֱ��funding will support roughly 150 Cambridge PhD students over the next five years.

̽��ֱ��CDT in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment: Unlocking Net Zero (FIBE3 CDT), led by Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa from the Department of Engineering, will focus on meeting the needs of the infrastructure and construction sector in its pursuit of net zero by 2050 and is a collaboration between Cambridge, 30+ industry partners and eight international academic partners.

“ ̽��ֱ��infrastructure sector is responsible for significant CO2 emissions, energy use and consumption of natural resources, and it’s key to unlocking net zero,” said Al-Tabbaa. “This CDT will develop the next generation of highly talented doctoral graduates who will be equipped to lead the design and implementation of the net zero infrastructure agenda in the UK.”

̽��ֱ��FIBE3 CDT will provide more than 70 fully funded studentships over the next five years. ̽��ֱ��£8.1M funding from EPSRC is supported by £1.3M funding from the ̽��ֱ�� and over £2.5M from industry as well as over £8.9M of in-kind contributions. Recruitment is underway for the first FIBE3 CDT cohort, to start in October.

̽��ֱ��CDT in Sensor Technologies and Applications in an Uncertain World, led by Professor Clemens Kaminski from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, will cover the entire sensor research chain – from development to end of life – and will emphasise systems thinking, responsible research and innovation, co-creation, and cohort learning.

“Our CDT will provide students with comprehensive expertise and skills in sensor technology,” said Kaminski. “This programme will develop experts who are capable of driving impactful sensor solutions for industry and society, and can deal with uncertain data and the consequences of a rapidly changing world.”

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� is also a partner in:

EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in 2D Materials of Tomorrow (2DMoT), led by: Professor Irina Grigorieva from the ̽��ֱ�� of Manchester
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training Developing National Capability for Materials 4.0 and Henry Royce Institute, led by Professor William Parnell from the ̽��ֱ�� of Manchester
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Superconductivity: Enabling Transformative Technologies, led by Professor Antony Carrington from the ̽��ֱ�� of Bristol
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Aerosol Science: Harnessing Aerosol Science for Improved Security, Resilience and Global Health, led by Professor Jonathan Reid from the ̽��ֱ�� of Bristol
EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Photonic and Electronic Systems, led by Professor Alwyn Seeds from ̽��ֱ�� College London

“As innovators across the world break new ground faster than ever, it is vital that government, business and academia invest in ambitious UK talent, giving them the tools to pioneer new discoveries that benefit all our lives while creating new jobs and growing the economy,” said Science and Technology Secretary, Michelle Donelan. “By targeting critical technologies including artificial intelligence and future telecoms, we are supporting world-class universities across the UK to build the skills base we need to unleash the potential of future tech and maintain our country’s reputation as a hub of cutting-edge research and development.”

“ ̽��ֱ��Centres for Doctoral Training will help to prepare the next generation of researchers, specialists and industry experts across a wide range of sectors and industries,” said Professor Charlotte Deane, Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation. “Spanning locations across the UK and a wide range of disciplines, the new centres are a vivid illustration of the UK’s depth of expertise and potential, which will help us to tackle large-scale, complex challenges and benefit society and the economy. ̽��ֱ��high calibre of both the new centres and applicants is a testament to the abundance of research excellence across the UK, and EPSRC’s role as part of UKRI is to invest in this excellence to advance knowledge and deliver a sustainable, resilient and prosperous nation.”

More than 4,000 doctoral students will be trained over the next nine years, building on EPSRC’s long-standing record of sustained support for doctoral training.

Total investment in the CDTs includes:

£479 million by EPSRC, including £16 million of additional UKRI funding to support CDTs in quantum technologies
Over £7 million from Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, also part of UKRI, to co-fund three CDTs
£16 million by the MOD to support two CDTs
£169 million by UK universities
plus a further £420 million in financial and in-kind support from business partners

This investment includes an additional £135 million for CDTs which will start in 2025. More than 1,400 companies, higher education institutions, charities and civic organisations are taking part in the centres for doctoral training. CDTs have a significant reputation for training future UK academics, industrialists and innovators who have gone on to develop the latest technologies.

Sixty-five Centres for Doctoral Training – which will train more than 4000 doctoral students across the UK – have been announced by Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan.

Phynart Studio via Getty Images

Two people working on circuit boards

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Driving force behind cellular ‘protein factories’ could have implications for neurodegenerative disease

erh68 — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 19:00:00 +0000

In a study published today in Science Advances, researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge show that tiny components within the cell are the biological engines behind effective protein production.

̽��ֱ��endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is the cell’s protein factory, producing and modifying the proteins needed to ensure healthy cell function. It is the cell’s biggest organelle and exists in a web-like structure of tubes and sheets. ̽��ֱ��ER moves rapidly and constantly changes shape, extending across the cell to wherever it is needed at any given moment.

Using super-resolution microscopy techniques, researchers from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CEB) have discovered the driving force behind these movements – a breakthrough that could have significant impact on the study of neurodegenerative diseases.

“It has been known that the endoplasmic reticulum has a very dynamic structure – constantly stretching and extending its shape inside the cell,” said Dr Meng Lu, research associate in the Laser Analytics Group, led by Professor Clemens Kaminski.

“ ̽��ֱ��ER needs to be able to reach all places efficiently and quickly to perform essential housekeeping functions within the cell, whenever and wherever the need arises. Impairment of this capability is linked to diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and ALS. So far there has been limited understanding of how the ER achieves these rapid and fascinating changes in shape and how it responds to cellular stimuli.”

Lu and colleagues discovered that another cell component holds the key – small structures, that look like tiny droplets contained in membranes, called lysosomes.

Lysosomes can be thought of as the cell’s recycling centres: they capture damaged proteins, breaking them down into their original building blocks so that they can be reused in the production of new proteins. Lysosomes also act as sensing centres – picking up on environmental cues and communicating these to other parts of the cell, which adapt accordingly.

There can be up to 1,000 or so lysosomes zipping around the cell at any one time and with them, the ER appears to change its shape and location, in an apparently orchestrated fashion.

What surprised the Cambridge scientists was their discovery of a causal link between the movement of the tiny lysosomes within the cell and the reshaping process of the large ER network.

“We could show that it is the movement of the lysosomes themselves that forces the ER to reshape in response to cellular stimuli,” said Lu. “When the cell senses that there is a need for lysosomes and ER to travel to distal corners of the cell, the lysosomes pull the ER web along with them, like tiny locomotives.”

From a biological point of view, this makes sense: ̽��ֱ��lysosomes act as a sensor inside the cell, and the ER as a response unit; co-ordinating their synchronous function is critical to cellular health.

To discover this surprising bond between two very different organelles, Kaminski’s research team made use of new imaging technologies and machine learning algorithms, which gave them unprecedented insights into the inner workings of the cell.

“It is fascinating that we are now able to look inside living cells and see the marvellous speed and dynamics of the cellular machinery at such detail and in real time,” said Kaminski. “Only a few years ago, watching organelles going about their business inside the cell would have been unthinkable.”

̽��ֱ��researchers used illumination patterns projected onto living cells at high speed, and advanced computer algorithms to recover information on a scale more than one hundred times smaller than the width of a human hair. To capture such information at video rates has only recently become possible.

̽��ֱ��researchers also used machine learning algorithms to extract the structure and movement of the ER networks and lysosomes in an automated fashion from thousands of datasets.

̽��ֱ��team extended their research to look at neurons or nerve cells – specialised cells with long protrusions called axons along which signals are transmitted. Axons are extremely thin tubular structures and it was not known how the movement of the very large ER network is orchestrated inside these structures.

̽��ֱ��study shows how lysosomes travel easily along the axons and drag the ER along behind them. ̽��ֱ��researchers also show how impairing this process is detrimental to the development of growing neurons.

Frequently, the researchers saw events where the lysosomes acted as repair engines for disconnected or broken pieces of ER structure, merging and fusing them into an intact network again. ̽��ֱ��work is therefore relevant for an understanding of disorders of the nervous system and its repair.

̽��ֱ��team also studied the biological significance of this coupled movement, providing a stimulus – in this case nutrients – for the lysosomes to sense. ̽��ֱ��lysosomes were seen to move towards this signal, dragging the ER network behind so that the cell can elicit a suitable response.

“So far, little was known on the regulation of ER structure in response to metabolic signals,” said Lu. “Our research provides a link between lysosomes as sensors units that actively steer the local ER response.”

̽��ֱ��team hopes that their insights will prove invaluable to those studying links between disease and cellular response, and their own next steps are focused on studying ER function and dysfunction in diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Neurodegenerative disorders are associated with aggregation of damaged and misfolded proteins, so understanding the underlying mechanisms of ER function is critical to research into their treatment and prevention.

“ ̽��ֱ��discoveries of the ER and lysosomes were awarded the Nobel Prize many years ago – they are key organelles essential for healthy cellular function,” said Kaminski. “It is fascinating to think that there is still so much to learn about this system, which is incredibly important to fundamental biomedical science looking to find the cause and cures of these devastating diseases.”

Reference:
Meng Lu et al. ' ̽��ֱ��structure and global distribution ofthe endoplasmic reticulum network is actively regulated by lysosomes.' Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc7209

Researchers have identified the driving force behind a cellular process linked to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease.

There is still so much to learn about this system, which is incredibly important to fundamental biomedical science

Clemens Kaminski

Inducing lysosome (green) anterograde motion with light leads to a rapid and significant extension of ER network (magenta).

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Yes

Cambridge receives new funding to support PhD students in science and engineering

sc604 — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 09:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��funding, from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and industrial and institutional partners, will support the establishment of five new CDTs at Cambridge. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� will be a partner institution in an additional four new CDTs. ̽��ֱ��results of the latest CDT funding round were announced today by EPSRC at an event in London.

In total, EPSRC is supporting 75 new CDTs across the UK, representing a total investment of £446 million. ̽��ֱ��Centres’ 1,400 project partners have contributed £386 million in cash and in-kind support, and include companies such as Tata Steel and Procter and Gamble and charities such as Cancer Research UK. ̽��ֱ��funding represents one of the UK’s most significant investments in research skills.

Science and Innovation Minister Chris Skidmore said: “As we explore new research to boost our economy with an increase of over £7 billion invested in R&D over five years to 2021/22 – the highest increase for over 40 years – we will need skilled people to turn ideas into inventions that can have a positive impact on our daily lives.

“ ̽��ֱ��Centres for Doctoral Training at universities across the country will offer the next generation of PhD students the ability to get ahead of the curve. In addition, this has resulted in nearly £400 million being leveraged from industry partners. This is our modern Industrial Strategy in action, ensuring all corners of the UK thrive with the skills they need for the jobs of tomorrow.

“As Science Minister, I’m delighted we’re making this massive investment in postgraduate students as part of our increased investment in R&D.”

CDT students are funded for four years and the programme includes technical and transferrable skills training as well as a research element. ̽��ֱ��centres bring together diverse areas of expertise to provide engineers and scientists with the skills, knowledge and confidence to tackle today’s evolving issues and future challenges.

̽��ֱ��importance of developing STEM skills is a key part of the Government’s Industrial Strategy, ensuring that all areas of the UK embrace innovation and build the skills the economy needs to thrive.

̽��ֱ��five Cambridge-led CDTs are:

CDT in Future Propulsion and Power, led by Dr Graham Pullan (Department of Engineering)
CDT in Integrated Functional Nano (i4Nano), led by Professor Jeremy Baumberg (Department of Physics)
CDT in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment: Resilience in a Changing World (FIBE2), led by Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa (Department of Engineering)
CDT in Sensor Technologies for a Healthy and Sustainable Future, led by Professor Clemens Kaminski (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology)
CDT in Automated Chemical Synthesis Enabled by Digital Molecular Technologies, led by Professor Matthew Gaunt (Department of Chemistry)

̽��ֱ��first cohort of students in the new CDTs will begin their studies in October.

Professor Lynn Gladden, EPSRC’s Executive Chair, said: “ ̽��ֱ��UK’s research base makes the discoveries that lead to innovations and these can improve lives and generate income for the UK. Centres for Doctoral Training have already proven to be successful in attracting the world’s brightest minds and industry support to address the scientific and engineering challenges we face. This new cadre will continue to build on previous investment.”

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has received new government and industrial funding to support at least 350 PhD students over the next eight years, via the creation of new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs).

Photo by Sweet Ice Cream Photography on Unsplash

Yes

Students invent new technology to improve later life

ta385 — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 09:30:00 +0000

As part of their Master of Research programme at the ̽��ֱ��’s EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Sensor Technologies and Applications last year, the ten students were given 12 weeks to develop an integrated suite of wireless devices to enable family members and carers to monitor the wellbeing of an older person, remotely and with minimal invasion of privacy.

Details of the team’s breakthrough have just been published in ̽��ֱ��Royal Society’s Interface Focus journal.

According to ̽��ֱ��Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, around one in three adults aged over 65 who live at home will suffer at least one fall a year; and in 2009, in England and Wales alone, this age group accounted for 7,475 deaths as a result of an accident. Nevertheless, the vast majority of older people would still prefer to stay in their own homes until it is impossible for them to do so, rather than move into residential care.

Three million people in the UK are aged 80 or over, and the number of people aged over 85 is set to double in the next 20 years. With ageing populations placing increasing pressure on health services in the UK and many other countries, there is growing demand for assisted living technologies to enable older people to live independently and safely in their own homes for longer.

But as team member Oliver Bonner, an electronics engineer, explains:

“Existing monitoring devices are often too bulky, only perform one function and can’t be integrated because manufacturers don’t want their products used alongside those of rival brands. What we’ve done is develop an open platform so that anyone who invents an ingenious assistive device can bring that into the system and enhance what it can do for older people.”

̽��ֱ��interdisciplinary team – comprising engineers, chemists, biochemists, materials scientists and physicists – designed and incorporated five assistive devices into their sensor suite: a door sensor, power monitor, fall detector, general in-house sensor unit, and an on-person location-aware communications device. ̽��ֱ��group improved on existing devices, in part, by taking advantage of recent developments in 3D printing, printed circuit board production and electronics prototyping.

Josephine Hughes, who studied engineering as an undergraduate at Cambridge and is now pursuing a PhD in robotics, said:

“We’ve created a non-intrusive safety net that can be used to help older people live independently in their own homes for as long as possible while also connecting them with their friends and family. We had to ensure that older people would accept the system.”

To protect the privacy of older people, the in-house system uses motion and audio detectors to establish presence but no cameras or sound recording devices. Towards the end of the project, the team installed their sensor suite in the home of team member, Philip Mair, a biochemist. With kind permission from Mair’s flatmates, the group tested the system for two weeks and, to their relief, discovered that it was fully operational.

Extensive further testing would be required before the system could be commercialised but it has already attracted interest from potential investors and manufacturers.

Philip Mair said: “ ̽��ֱ��toughest part of the project was having to tear up our first proposal and start over again. Once we got into the development phase, we had to wait for our area of expertise to come into play but also pick up entirely new skills very quickly, in my case, programming.”

Professor Clemens Kaminski, Director of the Sensor CDT at Cambridge, said:

“ ̽��ֱ��sensor team challenge was a unique experience for all involved and what these students have achieved is astonishing. To devise a proposal, budget and work plan as well as build and demonstrate such a sophisticated system in such a short period is remarkable.

"Their sensor suite significantly outperforms any commercial solution currently available and the team has made a genuine contribution to society by sharing the advances which it has made. ̽��ֱ��experience will stay with them for the rest of their careers.”

All ten team members are now working on other projects as part of PhD research at Cambridge.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� is a world leader in the science and technology of sensing and myriad sensor technologies have been developed here, ranging from DNA sequencing to plastic transistors. ̽��ֱ��CDT in Sensor Technologies and Applications connects more than 100 academics from 20 departments and leading industries to provide a coordinated training programme and PhD experience to outstanding students from a large number of disciplines.

During the first year of the Sensor CDT studentship, which leads to the Master of Research qualification, students immediately begin to engage in sensor innovation through course work and experimental projects. ̽��ֱ��experience differs from that of a traditional, single-discipline PhD as students work across different Departments and undertake projects both individually and in teams. Students interact with industrial partners who are also pushing the boundaries of sensor innovation, and learn how to achieve radically new solutions to current and future sensor challenges.

A showcase event for Cambridge activities in the field is the Sensors 2016 conference (14 October 2016) which will host international speakers as well as the current CDT cohort, who will present the outcome of their own team challenge, focused on building a medical imaging device.

̽��ֱ��team:

James Manton; Omar Amjad; Josephine Hughes; Isabella Miele; Philip Mair; Tiesheng Wang; Oliver Bonner; Vitaly Levdik; Richard Hall; Géraldine Baekelandt.

Teaching team members: Prof Clemens F. Kaminski; Dr Oliver Hadeler; Dr Fernando da Cruz Vasconcellos; Dr Tanya Hutter.

A team of post-graduate students has published research with the potential to transform the lives of millions of older people around the world.

̽��ֱ��team has made a genuine contribution to society by sharing the advances which it has made. ̽��ֱ��experience will stay with them for the rest of their careers.

Professor Clemens Kaminski, Director of the Sensor CDT, Cambridge

Team members from Cambridge's EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Sensor Technologies and Applications.

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Yes

̽��ֱ��super-resolution revolution

lw355 — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 09:30:07 +0000

There has been a revolution in optical microscopy and it’s been 350 years in the making. Ever since Robert Hooke published his Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies in 1665, the microscope has opened up the world in miniature. But it has also been limited by the wavelength of light.

Anything smaller than the size of a bacterial cell (around 250 nanometres) appears as a blurred blob through an optical microscope, simply because light waves spread when they are focused on a tiny spot. As a result, resolving two tiny spots that lie close together has been tantalisingly out of reach using an optical microscope. Unfortunately, many biological interactions occur at a spatial scale much smaller than this.

But, thanks to recent breakthroughs, a new era of super-resolution microscopy has begun. ̽��ֱ��developments earned inventors Eric Betzig and William E Moerner (USA) and Stefan Hell (Germany) the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and are based on clever physical tricks that work around the problem of light diffraction.

Professor Clemens Kaminski, whose team in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology designs and builds super-resolution microscopes to study Alzheimer’s disease, explained: “ ̽��ֱ��technology is based on a conceptual change, a different way of thinking about how we resolve tiny structures. By imaging blobs of light at separate points in time, we are able to discriminate them spatially, and thus prevent image blur.”

Imagine taking a photo of a tree lit by the glow of ten thousand tiny lights scattered over its branches. ̽��ֱ��emission from each light would overlap. At best you would see a fuzzy, glowing shape lacking in detail. But if you were to switch on only a few lights at a time, locate the centre of each glow and take a picture, and then repeat this process thousands of times for different lights, the composite image would resolve into a myriad of distinguishable dots, denoting the exact position of each individual light on the tree.

This is analogous to the techniques developed by the Nobel Prize winners: in one technique, a sample is tagged with light-activated markers called fluorophores that can be switched on and off with pulses of light, like a switchable light bulb; in another, the light at the outer edges of each blob of light is selectively blocked.

Either way, by imaging a sparse subset of lights, they can be localised with nanometre precision. When combined, a picture starts to emerge that features a resolution that is 10 to 100 times better than previously possible.

“It’s been hailed as revolutionary because it means that biologists can validate some of their hypotheses for the first time,” said Dr Kevin O’Holleran who co-leads the Cambridge Advanced Imaging Centre (CAIC), which is currently building two super-resolution microscopes. “Although electron microscopy has very high resolution, it can’t be performed on live cells. With super-resolution optical microscopy, scientists can track molecular processes as they happen and in three dimensions.”

Meanwhile, Dr Steven Lee and Professor David Klenerman in the Department of Chemistry have built what they believe is the first 3D super-resolution microscope of its kind in Europe. They are using the machine to watch the organisation of cell-surface proteins at the point when an immune cell is triggered into action. Before super-resolution, they needed to artificially reduce the number of proteins on the cell surface to make visualisation easier; now, they can work with normal levels of up to 10,000 proteins at a time on the cell surface.

“These exciting discoveries have emerged through years of painstaking research by physical scientists trying to better understand how light interacts with matter at a fundamental level,” explained Lee. “This work has enabled us to gain insight into biological processes by simply ‘looking’ at dynamic events at spatial scales that much better approximate the physical dimension that biomolecules interact on.”

Kaminski’s team has been visualising the ultrastructure of the clumps of misfolded proteins that cause Alzheimer’s disease. “We’d like to study what causes proteins to become toxic when they aggregate, and visualise them as they move from cell to cell to see whether there are opportunities early in the process to halt their progression.”

Like any fast-moving and transformative technology, super-resolution microscopy has required researchers to drive forward the capabilities of the lenses and light sources, as well as the chemistry of the fluorophores and the mathematical algorithms for image analysis. As a result, designing and building their own microscopes, rather than waiting for commercial devices to become available, has been the best option.

“ ̽��ֱ��field is dynamic and no instrument is exactly right for the questions you want to answer. We have to build the instrument around the science,” explained Dr George Sirinakis, who works with Professor Daniel St Johnston in the Gurdon Institute. His machines will be used to understand cell polarity and visualise the movement of thousands of tiny sacs called vesicles as they transport their cargo within cells. This process has never been seen before because the vesicles are so small and move fast.

No longer are these benchtop machines. Super-resolution microscopes resemble an army of lenses and mirrors marching across a table top, each minutely turning, concentrating and shaping the light beam that falls onto the sample stained with fluorescence markers. Tens of thousands of images are collected from any one sample – creating a deluge of ‘big data’ that requires complex mathematical algorithms to make sense of the information.

Quite simply, super-resolution microscopy is a feat of engineering, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and biology, and it’s therefore out of reach to researchers who lack the necessary expertise or funds to take a step into this field.

CAIC has recently been created to meet super-resolution and other microscopy needs in the biological sciences. “We are a research and development facility. We have state-of-the- art commercial microscopes and we build our own, tailoring them to the needs of the biologists who come to us as a service facility or as a collaborative venture,” explained O’Holleran, who estimates that around 100 researchers will become part of the CAIC community.

“We’re also a hub. We connect researchers who’ve built their own devices and we train PhD students in the cross-disciplinary skills needed for cutting-edge imaging.”

CAIC, Klenerman, Kaminski and others have now been awarded funding as part of the Next Generation Microscopy Initiative Programme led by the Medical Research Council to help establish Cambridge as a national centre of excellence in microscopy. Part of this funding is being used for the two new super-resolution microscopes currently being built in CAIC.

̽��ֱ��researchers hope that super-resolution microscopes will one day become the workhorse of biology, allowing ever-deeper probing of living structures. Breaking the diffraction barrier of light had seemed an insurmountable barrier until recent years. With continuing advances, biologists are beginning to look beyond imaging single cells to the possibility of moving through tissues, tracking the movement of molecules in three dimensions and visualising the process of life unfolding.

Inset image: What was once a fuzzy glow (left of image) can now be super-resolved (right) even if, as here, the structures are smaller than the wavelength of light; credit: Laurie Young, Florian Stroehl and Clemens Kaminski

Cambridge scientists are part of a resolution revolution. Building powerful instruments that shatter the physical limits of optical microscopy, they are beginning to watch molecular processes as they happen, and in three dimensions.

These exciting discoveries have emerged through years of painstaking research by physical scientists trying to better understand how light interacts with matter at a fundamental level

Steven Lee

̽��ֱ��Super-Resolution Revolution

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Yes

Cambridge awarded EPSRC funding for doctoral training centres in sensing and analysis

lw355 — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 15:24:27 +0000

̽��ֱ��two new centres providing postgraduate training are the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) CDT in Sensor Technologies and Application and the EPSRC CDT in Analysis.

̽��ֱ��CDT in Sensor Technologies and Application builds on CamBridgeSens, the ̽��ֱ��'s strategic network in sensor research. Professor Clemens Kaminski of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and Director of the CDT said: “Sensors are a pervasive technology now, impacting on every aspect of our lives, and markets are already thought to exceed £300bn globally. There is enormous potential here for UK industry and academia to capitalise on these developments, but there are challenges too. Sensor innovation requires foundations in incredibly diverse fields. Traditional, single-discipline PhD programmes are not suited for this task. ̽��ֱ��CDT will act like a ‘virtual superdepartment’ in sensor technologies to educate the next generation of sensor champions.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Centre for Analysis also comes on the back of previous high achievement in this area. “We are happy to be able to build on the success of the last four years – and look forward to training some of the best mathematical talent around in the next five cohorts of our CDT,” said Director of the CDT, Professor James Norris of the Department of Pure Maths and Mathematical Statistics.

̽��ֱ��EPSRC and other research councils have been able to fund these new Centres, a total of 22 across the country, following a £106 million investment announced in the Budget. ̽��ֱ��support of industry, universities and charitable partners, on top of the funding for 91 centres previously announced by EPSRC, now brings the total investment in training for future scientists and engineers to over £950m.

Chief Executive of the EPSRC, Professor David Delpy, commented: “ ̽��ֱ��CDT model has proved highly popular with universities and industry and these new Centres will mean that the UK is even better placed to maintain the vital supply of trained scientists and engineers.”

Two new Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) are to be funded as part of a package unveiled by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ̽��ֱ��Rt. Hon George Osborne MP, today (March 28 2014).

̽��ֱ��CDT model has proved highly popular with universities and industry and these new Centres will mean that the UK is even better placed to maintain the vital supply of trained scientists and engineers.

Chief Executive of the EPSRC, Professor David Delpy

Alzheimer's Research UK

One of the CDTs focuses on sensor technologies and their applications (laboratory of Clemens Kaminski shown here)

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Yes

Finding malaria's weak spot

admin — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:06:33 +0000

After over a decade of research into malaria, biologists Dr Teresa Tiffert and Dr Virgilio Lew at the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience found their efforts to observe a key stage of the infection cycle severely hindered by the limits of available technology. An innovative collaboration with physicist Dr Pietro Cicuta at the Cavendish Laboratory and bio-imaging specialist Professor Clemens Kaminski in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology is now yielding new insights into this devastating disease.

Under attack

Malaria is caused by parasites transmitted to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes. According to the World Malaria Report 2011, there were about 216 million cases of malaria causing an estimated 655,000 deaths in 2010. Tiffert and Lew established their malaria laboratory in Cambridge in 1999 to investigate the most deadly form of the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. Becoming increasingly resistant to available drugs, this species in particular is a growing public health concern.

Their current focus is a mysterious step in the life cycle of P. falciparum occurring inside the infected human’s bloodstream. ̽��ֱ��parasites, at this stage called merozoites, attach to and enter red blood cells (RBCs) to develop and multiply. After two days, the new merozoites are released and infect neighbouring RBCs. Over several days, this process amplifies the number of parasitised RBCs and causes severe and potentially lethal symptoms in humans.

“A huge amount of research has been devoted to understanding the RBC penetration process,” said Tiffert. “ ̽��ֱ��focus of many vaccine efforts is the molecules on the surfaces of both parasite and red cell that are instrumental in recognition and penetration. Our collaboration with Clemens developed new imaging approaches to investigate what happens in the cells after invasion. But the pre-invasion stage, when a merozoite first contacts a cell targeted for invasion, remained a profound mystery. Our research indicates that this stage is absolutely critical in determining the proportion of cells that will be infected in an individual.”

For invasion to occur, the tip of the merozoite has to be aligned perpendicularly to the RBC membrane. Tiffert and Lew are focusing on how this alignment comes about, which has proved a formidable technical challenge. “ ̽��ֱ��merozoites are only in the bloodstream for less than two minutes, where they are vulnerable to attack by the host’s immune system, before entering a RBC. To investigate what is going on we need to record lots of pre-invasion and penetration sequences at high speed, using high magnification and variable focusing in three dimensions. And the real challenge is to have the microscope on the right settings and to be recording at exactly the time when an infected cell has burst and released merozoites – something that is impossible to predict,” said Tiffert.

Techniques used by previous investigators have produced few useful recordings of this process occurring in culture, but from these an astonishing picture is emerging. “ ̽��ֱ��contact of the merozoite with the RBC elicits vigorous shape changes in the cell, not seen in any other context,” said Lew. “It seems clear that this helps the merozoite orientate itself correctly for penetration, because all movement stops as soon as this happens. ̽��ֱ��parasite is somehow getting the RBC to help it invade.”

A collaborative approach

Cicuta, a ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer involved in the ̽��ֱ��’s Physics of Medicine Initiative – which is bringing together researchers working at the interface of physical sciences, life sciences and clinical sciences – met the trio by chance three years ago. He realised he could use his background in fundamental physics to pioneer a new approach to understanding malaria. “It’s been a gradual move for me to apply what I’ve learnt in physics to biology,” he said. “From the physics point of view, RBC membranes are a material. This material is very soft and undergoes deformations and fluctuations, and I was interested in understanding the mechanics involved during infection with malaria.”

Drawing on his expertise in the development of experimental techniques, Cicuta collaborated with Tiffert, Lew and Kaminski to pioneer a completely automated imaging system that pushes the boundaries of live cell imaging, enabling individual RBCs and merozoites to be observed throughout the process of infection. ̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

“This microscope can not only run by itself for days, it can perform all the tasks that a human would otherwise be doing. It can refocus, it can find infected cells and zoom in, and when it detects a release of parasites it can change its imaging modality by going into a high frame-rate acquisition. And when the release has finished it can search around in the culture to find another cell to monitor automatically,” said Cicuta. “We also want to integrate a technique called an optical trap, which uses a laser beam to grab cells and move them around, so we can deliver the parasites to the cells ourselves and see how they invade.”

“So far, we’ve been able to gather over 50 videos of infections, which my PhD student Alex Crick has processed to show very clearly that the RBCs undergo large changes in shape when the merozoites touch them. We’ve also seen very strange shape changes just before the parasites come out of the cells, and we want to see whether this has a bearing on the parasites’ ability to infect subsequent cells.”

During the development of the microscope, the team discovered variability in the way the infected RBCs behave before they burst. “It’s important to know that there isn’t just one story. ̽��ֱ��only way to find this out is to look at many cells, which this system allows,” said Lew. “It’s a new level of data that allows us to get experimentally significant results, and better understand the diversity of the merozoites,” Cicuta added.

Used in conjunction with other tools such as fluorescent indicators and molecular biological tools, the new technology will allow Tiffert and Lew to test their hypotheses about the pre-invasion stage of the disease. They hope to determine the critical steps, which could provide clues as to how to stop an infection. “This microscope is an extraordinary new tool that has potential for use across a huge field of biological problems involving cellular interactions,” explained Lew.

“It may provide a route to designing effective antimalarial drugs, reducing invasive efficiency and decreasing mortality,” said Tiffert. “ ̽��ֱ��automation we have achieved with this microscope will also be very important for future testing of malaria drugs and vaccines,” added Cicuta.

A visionary initiative

“ ̽��ֱ��Physics of Medicine Initiative has been essential to our work,” said Cicuta. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� formally established the Initiative in December 2008 through the opening of a new purpose-built research facility adjacent to the Cavendish Laboratory, funded by the ̽��ֱ�� and ̽��ֱ��Wolfson Foundation. ̽��ֱ��goal is to break down traditional barriers that have tended to limit interactions between researchers in the physical and biomedical sciences.

“I met my collaborators through a Physics of Medicine symposium, and the new building is the only place in the ̽��ֱ�� where this type of research can be done,” added Cicuta. “It’s set up for safe handling of hazardous biological organisms like P. falciparum, and also has the facilities to design hardware for our advanced microscopes. This work is exciting because it’s interdisciplinary. By applying physics to the knowledge biologists have been developing for many years, we can make very fast progress.”

For more information, please contact Jacqueline Garget at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications

A ground-breaking imaging system to track malarial infection of blood cells in real time has been created by a collaboration catalysed by the ̽��ֱ��’s Physics of Medicine Initiative.

Finding Malaria's Weak Spot

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Bridging the sensor gap

tdk25 — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We live in a world aided by sensors – devices that measure a physical quantity, convert the measurement to a signal, and interpret and act on the result to provide real-time information about the world around us. Their uses are as diverse as the science that goes into making them: monitoring environmental change and the state of our health; enhancing process control and product assessment in industry; providing security and safety information – in short, sensors affect how we live, work and make decisions. ̽��ֱ��value of the global sensor market has passed the £100 billion mark already and market projections predict enormous future growth.

World-leading research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is pushing the limits in sensor technology – ever smaller, cheaper, more sensitive and robust – reflecting the great strengths in sensor research in the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics, computer science and technology. But to allow the quantum leaps forward that many believe are possible, it is becoming crucial to connect the disciplines and bridge the gaps. This is the goal of CamBridgeSens, a new initiative sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

‘We aim to fundamentally change the way sensor research is conducted in Cambridge by creating an environment where researchers are able to explore their most adventurous and creative ideas. We also seek to connect the tremendous expertise and skills that exist here, to put us in a leading position to tackle even the most challenging problems in sensor research,’ said Dr Clemens Kaminski, of the Department of Chemical Engineering, who leads the project with Professor Lisa Hall of the Institute of Biotechnology.

From sandpits to kindergartens

A key issue in bridging disciplines is to develop a common language, as Professor Hall explained: ‘Because this initiative has at its heart a shared vision of traversing the boundaries of traditional sensor research and invoking unique interfaces between disciplines, a basis for communication needs to be achieved early enough to engage its partners and broaden the experience and appreciation of students.’

Underpinning this cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration will be a diverse group of ‘Research Ambassadors’, comprising leading researchers at Cambridge plus industrialists, all of whom are recognised world leaders in the sensor field. ̽��ֱ��programme will be managed ‘from the bottom up’ and major drivers will be future students engaging in sensor-related research. ‘ ̽��ֱ��quality of the studentship at Cambridge is a great asset,’ said Dr Kaminski. ‘By enabling young researchers to realise their ideas through ‘sandpit’ brainstorming events, research competitions and secondment opportunities (as well as through offers of real cash!), radically new approaches to sensor research will emerge.’

Through a ‘kindergarten’ programme, students will receive research experience in a variety of disciplines in their first or second year. Early-career researchers will be encouraged to undertake discipline-hopping secondments and industrial exchanges, supported by Research Ambassadors promoting interactions at the grass roots.

Breaking down barriers

̽��ֱ��scale of CamBridgeSens is ambitious: under the steerage of Dr Mica Green, coordinator of the project, at least 50 research students will participate, and 20 Research Ambassadors have agreed to provide solid foundations for what is set to become a network of international excellence.

But the implications of the initiative stretch wide and have the potential to transform the training and research culture in Cambridge. ‘By breaking down discipline barriers and creating identities between researchers with common research goals that transcend departmental affiliation,’ said Professor Ian White, Chair of the School of Technology, ‘Cambridge can play a powerful role in responding to challenging problems of the future.’

For more information about CamBridgeSens and how to participate, please visit www.sensors.cam.ac.uk/

CamBridgeSens - a strategic initiative to bridge gaps across disciplines, departments and research cultures - launches this summer.

We aim to fundamentally change the way sensor research is conducted in Cambridge by creating an environment where researchers are able to explore their most adventurous and creative ideas.

Dr Clemens Kaminski

Credit-T Laurila

Chemical Engineering

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