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.
Posts
Karolina gives talk about undergraduate research to Maynooth University
Karolina was invited back to Maynooth University to talk about the impact of SPUR Summer undergraduate research internship had on her career.
ISMSC Poster receives commendation
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 attends Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting
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.
New article in RSC Advances: Glycoclusters with anti-biofilm activity
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.
Farewell to BSc student Mairead
Well done to Mairead on her project carried out in the group over the last few months. Good luck with everything in the future.
Invited seminar at Keele University
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.
Karol speaks at Le Chéile Conference Cork
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 speaks at Irish Biological Inorganic Chemistry Symposium
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.
Chemistry talks now supported on ResearchSeminars
Since working on Project Anansi as part of the Lindau Sciathon event, I’ve been very interested in the prospect of implementing a platform that would allow chemists to share open access webinars, thus broadening their audience globally. See the previous posts [1 and 2] for more details on why. Anansi partnered with the team in MIT who had developed http://ResearchSeminars.org earlier in 2020 to expand their platform to support other disciplines (including Chemistry and Economics).
I worked together with @AnywhereChem in order to develop a list of sub-topics in chemistry, which are now listed on ResearchSeminars website. Please see below an email I have circulated asking people to consider adding content. The flyer is available here [PDF].
Make chemistry seminars and conferences accessible worldwide: ResearchSeminars.org
Dear colleagues
I would like to draw your attention to a new resource now available to chemists to both share and discover webinars, talks, conferences and more, which are happening online all around us: http://ResearchSeminars.org/info
This strange year with its lockdowns and travel restrictions has been very difficult, however one silver lining has been a golden age in online chemistry talks on every topic imaginable, available right at your desk. It has become clear that online research talks, seminars and conferences are here to stay in one form or another, even as many other aspects of our work return to normality. This will continue to benefit researchers and students, particularly those who are not based in big universities or large cities, including researchers in the developing world. However, it is still very challenging to keep up-to-date with all these interesting events with different hosts advertising in different ways, and making sure you don’t miss the most relevant talks.
ResearchSeminars.org can be a solution to that obstacle. Some mathematics researchers at MIT built this free site, which is available to all and has valuable search tools, such as filtering by topic and language. Thanks to our positive interactions with the founders, since September, the site is accepting Chemistry talks. This is in addition to its use to great effect by researchers in Physics, Maths, Biology, Economics and Earth Sciences, which were supported since earlier in 2020, now totalling thousands of talks. Adding listings is easy (requires a free account) and will amplify the possible audience of your events once chemists start using this resource in earnest. Making our seminars and events “open access” is a positive step and ought to be the default choice unless a speaker does not wish to (e.g. presenting unpublished results). I know from my experience of organising a seminar series during lockdown that many of our speakers welcomed the opportunity to invite guests and promote their talk more widely when given the option to share a link on Twitter.
During this year, Twitter has been a great resource for keeping up to date with online events. For nearly 6 months, @SuperScienceGrl kept an index of upcoming webinars in addition to an ongoing list of chemistry conferences. The Twitter account @AnywhereChem was set up in response to the glut of exciting talks online, in order to share them far and wide and make sure no one missed out. Many of us benefited from this increased publicity alerting us to relevant talks. It is not sustainable to rely on just a few individuals, however, to keep the entire community up to date. ResearchSeminars.org provides the opportunity for event organisers themselves to commit to posting their timetables in a central database, making it easier for others like @AnywhereChem to publicise further from there.
I am asking you to seriously consider adding any upcoming events you are organising to ResearchSeminars.org and give researchers around the world an opportunity to find out more about what is happening in your university, research group or organisation. If you are planning to attend an online event in the near future, please forward this email to the organiser and see if they will take part. And most importantly, check in to see if any events in your field are occurring soon. This is a great opportunity to open the doors of seminar halls around the world and to the benefit of all.
Please find attached a flyer highlighting the main points and advantages of this new platform. I encourage you to forward this further to your network and to get in touch if you have any questions.
Kind regards,
Dr Joseph Byrne, School of Chemistry, NUI Galway
[See press release from MIT about the initial launch of ResearchSeminars in May 2020 here]
Byrne Research Group 