Month: March 2015

Posted on

Protobios CSO Toomas Neuman visiting the lab as part of the AIROPICO project

Toomas (Tom) Neuman joined the Butcher lab on January 21st for a two month period to teach us about Protobios, entrepreneurship and life in Estonia. Tom has been busy – one of his first tasks was to join a panel discussion with around 60 PhD students in the ILS winter school on “What does it mean to be a PhD student?” He especially commented on the properties that he as an employer is looking for in industry, including enthusiasm and dedication. Afterwards he joined in round table discussions with the students who were developing new courses for the ILS graduate program, and organising other student events. He has also presented the main idealogy and methods used in Protobios to our Tuesday Biophysics club, which led to a lively discussion amongst the 30 or so technicians, MSc & PhD students, postdocs and principle investigators present. Every week  he holds a workshop with the group to discuss setting up new businesses, brain-storming potential applications and new products. This week he focussed on a more autobiographical approach, going through his own entrepreneur adventures: “An entrepreneur is one who has at least one bankruptcy behind him” was one of his comments to emphasize that in business, as in life, we have to take risks. To introduce him to the cultural life in Helsinki, we visited one of the best “real ale” bars in Helsinki where Tom realised a big difference between Finns and Estonians: Estonians drink vodka and then beer, yet the custom is the opposite in Finland (or maybe just in the Butcher group??).

One of the possibilities that we want to foster through this exchange is not only knowledge on structural virology, but also possible networking for Tom and Protobios in Finland. To further these aims, we have had talks in Turku with Turku University, ArcDia International and Antibody Barcelona (other partners in the AIROPICO project), which have subsequently led to additional contacts with other biotech companies, and researchers in Helsinki University.

Time is flying by, and it is Tom’s last week next week. Time for a few more discussions, report writing and then back home now that all the snow has gone.

Posted on

Sir John Walker to give EMBO Keynote lecture in Helsinki, 10th June 2015

The European Molecular Biology Organisation will support a Keynote Lecture by the renowned Nobel Laureate, Sir John Walker during the Paulo Foundation Symposium “From Atomic Structure to Disease Mechanisms” held 10-12th June in Helsinki. Registration is now open for the meeting which is part of the <375> celebrations of Helsinki University.

Sir John’s lecture is entitled “The ATP synthase in mitochondria: involvement in life and death of eukaryotic cells”

Read more about ATP synthase in the Nature Scitable article “Mitochondria”

atpsynthase_4tt3
Ribbons representation of an ATP synthase structure from the PDBe deposition 4tt3, made using UCSF Chimera software. See Bason, J.V., Montgomery, M.G., Leslie, A.G., Walker, J.E. Pathway of binding of the intrinsically disordered mitochondrial inhibitor protein to F1-ATPase. PROC.NATL.ACAD.SCI.USA (2014) 111 pp. 11305 for more details.

“