Research Day 2014

Each year the Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences hosts a poster competition for all third year PhD students to showcase their research.  This year there were a record number of posters on display showing the range of research taking place in the Faculty

In presenting the posters, the faculty hopes to increase interest in and knowledge of research work taking place across all departments and to provide postgraduate students with a platform for the presentation of their work to a non-specialist audience.

The winners were:

1.   Federico Comitani, Department of Physics

Abstract: 

Pentameric Ligand-Gated Ion Channels (pLGICs) are an important class of proteins that mediate the transmission of fast synaptic signals between neurons, by allowing the passage of ions across the cell membrane in response to the binding of small molecules, the neurotransmitters. Malfunctioning of these neuroreceptors can lead to serious neuronal disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease; moreover, in invertebrates they are involved in insecticides resistance, making them major targets for drug and insecticide design.
Unfortunately, their complexity and the limited structural information from X-ray crystallography prevent a detailed understanding of their behaviour. State-of-the-art and novel computational techniques are therefore crucial to build an accurate picture at the atomic level of the mechanisms which drive the activation of pLGICs.
In this project, we used metadynamics, a novel methodology to accelerate rare events, to simulate a number of binding and unbinding events of the GABA neurotransmitter to the fruit fly RDL receptor, with the aim of understanding the binding properties of the system. A funnel shaped confining potential was applied to limit the exploration of the unbound states of GABA in the solvent, allowing for an accurate estimation of the binding free energy.

You can view Federico's poster here.

2. Seyed Ali Hosseini, Department of Informatics

3.  Luke Day, Department of Informatics​

 Abstract: The poster describes a published study on the accessibility of microRNA (miRNA) binding sites to metastable messenger RNA (mRNA) secondary structures close to minimum free energy conformations in the context of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) and mRNA concentration levels. The motivation for this work was to determine if features of miRNA bindings to metastable conformations could provide additional information supporting the differences in expression levels of two sequences defined by a SNP.

L. Day, O. Abdelhadi Ep Souki, A.A. Albrecht, K. Steinhofel. Accessibility of microRNA binding sites in meta-stable RNA secondary structures in the presence of SNPs. Bioinformatics, 30(3):343-352, 2014.

you can view Luke's poster here.