Joe was invited by the GlycoBio club at Massachusetts Institute of Technology about his recent article in RSC Advances, along with other work from the group. Carbohydrate researchers from MIT and other institutes in the Cambridge area tuned in to watch the talk and ask questions. Dr Adele Gabba hosted the seminar.
Joe has been awarded funding by Enterprise Ireland to support the preparation of a competitive application for the European Research Council Starting Grant. This funding will support a new research assistant to help Joe propose an innovative and compelling project.
Karolina was invited back to Maynooth University to talk about the impact of SPUR Summer undergraduate research internship had on her career.
Joe presented a poster at the International Symposium of Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry, held online by University of Oregon, Eugene. After engagement with other conferences attendees over Twitter, Joe’s poster was recognised for highly commendable work by the judges of the poster contest. The poster described work published in Angewandte Chemie.
Joe attended the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting this June/July (thanks to the nomination of the Irish Research Council). At the week-long meeting about interdisciplinary science, from Pandemics to Blackholes, Supramolecular Chemistry to Microscopy and the cutting-edge in batteries and medicine.
As well as networking with young scientists from around the world, he was lucky enough to attend networking sessions with several Nobel laureates and have conversations about his research interests with Robert Grubbs, Richard Schrock, Ada Yonath, Ben Feringa, Saul Perlmutter and Martin Chalfie.
Our new article, published in RSC Advances (a Gold Open Access journal), describes a series of new ruthenium-centred glycoclusters, which present four carbohydrate motifs around a three-dimensional octahedral scaffold. Multivalent glycoclusters have previously shown the ability to inhibit the carbohydrate-binding proteins which are produced by bacterium P. aeruginosa. Gordon Cooke’s group in TU Dublin tested these new compounds for their ability to inhibit growth of biofilm by P. aeruginosa and we observed that complex 8Gal, with flexible arms between the scaffold core and the galactose motif gave up to 80% inhibition of biofilm, when compared to the control – the other complexes and the ligand did not show antimicrobial activity. We propose that this activity is due to the ability of galactose to interact with the carbohydrate-binding protein LecA.
We thank Science Foundation Ireland for financial support for this work, as well as UCD School of Medicine’s SSRA Scheme, where preliminary studies began.
Well done to Mairead on her project carried out in the group over the last few months. Good luck with everything in the future.
Joe delivered a seminar to postgraduate students and academic staff at Keele University as part of their annual Seminar Series. Joe was invited to speak by Dr Chris Hawes, Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at Keele. The seminar was entitled “Sweetness and light: a journey towards diagnostic tools” and described the research which underpins the current work in the Byrne group as well as some recent results.
Karolina was selected to give a presentation at UCC’s Chemistry Le Chéile Conference. This was an event aimed at improving the visibility of women in chemistry research and industry, by showcasing postgraduate academic research and industry speakers.
Karol spoke about her PhD work, developing luminescent glycoconjugates for bacterial sensing applications.
Joe gave an oral presentation about his work with carbohydrate-functionalised metal complexes at the 2020 Irish Biological Inorganic Chemistry Symposium in November. The annual IBICS meeting, and subsequent AGM, were held online this year and were well attended. Before his talk, Prof Celine Marmion, the president of IBICS, drew attention again to his role in organising the ICI Postgraduate Chemistry Research Symposium in September. The talk was followed by a number of questions from the attendees.
Byrne Research Group 