Keele University
Bioinorganic Chemistry of Aluminium & Silicon
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What's on
What’s On January
Time for another what’s on page update. I know I know, you can barely contain your excitement. As always we’ll start with me because I’m the best.
Well I’ve been having some fun using yet more strange and new equipment, this time in the form of the new micro SEM the geology boys have. I’ve had some very pretty images coming through from the SEM analysis of plant silica (see below), though now comes the fun bit, figuring out what they show.
I’ve also been working through older samples that needed analysing, digesting frozen plant samples to determine their total silica content. The past couple of weeks have been spent slaving over a hot computer to put my poster together for the 10th Keele Meeting on Aluminium (I’m not actually doing anything on aluminium, but don’t tell them that).
Ladies first, so let’s start with Emma. In collaboration with colleagues in Sweden, Emma have been researching the influence of both preparation and biological media upon the average particle size distributions of two research aluminium based adjuvants over time. The data has taken her a month to collect but has highlighted some very interesting trends. Ultimately, this data will enhance knowledge of the chemistry which occurs when adjuvants are introduced into a cellular model allowing a greater understanding of what may influence biological mechanisms. She has also been working on the compiling the abstract book for the Keele meeting and preparing her poster for presentation (which has now been printed off and I can tell you, it looks fantastic).
So that’s Emma done, now onto the newbie. Krista has been looking at Graphite furnace Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy to measure total silicon content in waters in comparison to the silicic acid content, previously quantified by the molybdenum blue method and UV-VIS spectroscopy. The results that she has seen so far are interesting in the respect that total silicon and silicic acid ratios differ substantially in certain water samples. As with all of us, she has been preparing for the 10th annual Keele Meeting by producing a poster on this experimental work (which is now finished and printed, so make sure to look out for it at the Keele meeting). She has also been liaising with a group of MS patients and in the process of applying for ethical approval, in efforts to initialise a group study into the renal handling of silicon and aluminium excretion.
So what has our newest post-doc been up to? Well I’ll leave this to Matt as well to be honest, he outranks me and who am I to rewrite his masterful words?
“Hi all, another update for the ‘what’s on’ pages has been prompted by Ian and out of fear of being engaged in some bizarre practice, here’s what I have been up to. With the viva fast approaching my preparations have become somewhat more intensive yet I have managed to trawl through the literature on the new and exciting filed of aluminium based adjuvants that I have become involved in. My interests are currently focused on the potential cellular localisation of aluminium in a model of an aluminium based adjuvant, immune-potentiated-response. I shall be presenting a poster of my findings at the 10th biannual Keele meeting on Aluminium being held at Winchester from the 23rd – 27th February 2013. The meeting promises to be the most engaging yet, giving host to a culmination of the world’s research effort on aluminium”
Edit: Fabulous stuff from Matthew Mold, PhD…….yes you heard me right, Matt has since passed his viva *cough*minor corrections *cough* and is now a bona fide doctor. Huzzah and all that jazz.
Finally we come to the esteemed Dr Beardmore. James has been doing some more design work and coding for his new detailed simulations, and has been doing some performance testing of different programming languages (FORTRAN, C and Java). The execution speed for the various types of tasks his software would need to do is extremely high with FORTRAN, although C was close behind and Java could be coaxed into running at almost half the speed, when geeky optimisations we won't won't go into here were performed on Linux. Apparently people have been burnt at the stake for much less. For the non-techies out there, FORTRAN is a very old language specially designed for writing scientific software. Programs written in it are extremely fast, but the language verges on a computer equivalent of Enochian, and is equally diabolical to write. The development time of the software will be much shorter with Java, so despite it not being an absolute asphalt-shredding speed-demon of a language, the first working version will be in Java, with a possibility of future translation into FORTRAN. Additionally, James has been itching to get back in to the lab, and to that extent he is preparing to go to town on the second form of hydroxyaluminosilicate, HAS-B, which is more complicated to study because it requires a lower concentration of aluminium, and appears to be more prone to dropping out of solution. Just to complicate matters further, HAS-A is actually a precursor to its formation! James plans to study particle sizes and zeta potentials, and again filter the solutions and examine the filtrate in the graphite furnace.
What’s On Page: Winter Update
Happy New Year and all that jazz. For one reason or another I haven’t updated this page in a while so this will be a big winter update. Anyway let’s start with the most important person, the right honourable Ian Stokes aka me.
Well for pretty much all of October I was away in sunny Athens, doing a little bit of work and a lot of riot dodging (I swear Chris is trying to kill me, I think he said my next research trip was on a boat off the coast of Somalia). When I wasn’t avoiding the revolution I was working with Panagiotis Apostolakos and Pantelis Livanos, learning a couple of methods for callose localisation. Some of Chris’s previous work has shown that callose may be involved in silica deposition, so knowing how to find it could be pretty useful.
Anyway the first method I looked at was staining with aniline blue, a simple method which can provide some pretty beautiful images, which I’m not going to explain because then I’d have to kill you afterwards.
The second method was secondary immunofluorescence, which is a little bit more complex. Without blinding you with science (or if I’m honest, blinding myself) it involves using two antibodies. The first primary antibody binds to the target (in this case callose). The second antibody carries the fluorophore (the bit that glows) and binds to the primary antibody. But enough with the techno-jargon, you came here to see cool glowing images, so here they are.
In amongst all the science I did manage to see a few sites though, so here’s a lovely picture of me being a tourist at the Temple of Poseidon.
Apart from being deployed into a foreign warzone, I’ve also been continuing my work on my Slovenia experiment. A few experiments here and there, most of which just proving that I didn’t mess up the original experiment but it all needs doing.
That’s all well and good but what about the less awesome people in the group you say? Well I suppose I could give them a quick mention. Matt has finally submitted his PhD thesis!!!!!! Then he went on a lovely trip to the bottom of a pint glass for a week or so and now he’s back and getting into the swing of his post-doc. The title of his Magnum opus is “Complementary studies of the role of metals in the conformation and interactions of serum amyloid P component and β-amyloid Aβ42”. He will now be preparing for his viva defence in February (I recommended an assault rifle but apparently that’s not going to cut it).
Matt, Emma and Chris also recently visited to Sweden to visit collaborators based in the student town of Lund and the slightly more energised and fast-paced city of Malmö. After a very productive three-day meeting (generating over 90 sides of A4 notes!!), they have decided upon a plan for the project and the next logical steps to be taken into the characterisation of aluminium-based-adjuvants, in vaccination preparations.
Last year, James went to Finland to visit some collaborators, with a view to reproducing some of the experiments and obtaining new results on more sensitive equipment. He also wanted to performing studies with different methods, for instance to find total surface charge. The results obtained in Finland have helped to shed light on the size and zeta-potential readings obtained at Keele. A combination of the Keele results and total surface charge measurements performed in Oulu has helped him to understand HASA particle formation a little better. James had also been using filtration combined with Graphite Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy to determine what proportion of Al (and therefore HAS particles) were actually "seen" by the equipment, and also to validate the particle size results obtained. The total surface charge measurements obtained in Oulu combined with the size and zeta-potential results obtained both at Keele and Oulu complement these data nicely. Whilst James was in Finland, we were horrified to hear that no one was likely to get any Christmas presents ever again as reindeer is a delicacy there and he reports that his main mission outside research was to find and eat Rudolph before he left.
More recently, James has been performing some simple computational simulations of the solutions that he was studying in Marvin (our particle sizer - a Malvern ZetaSizer) earlier in the year, which surprised him in the accuracy of their behaviour, especially as they were only initial investigations. They simulated several aspects of particle formation, including the buffering effect of aluminium hydroxide.
In December, he went to visit collaborators at the University of the Basque country in San Sebastian, northern Spain, in order to work on better and more comprehensive simulation designs, which he has begun coding. Finally, his 12-CPU (24 virtual CPU) behemoth will really be able to stretch its metaphorical legs on some real number-crunching! These new simulations should allow further detail to be simulated without excessive computational effort, and should also allow experimental results from both quantum simulations and benchtop chemistry, to be used directly as operating parameters. The model simulates collections of particles moving around in a box. It can optionally use the seminal "Metropolis" algorithm to govern particle motion (as the original 1953 paper did), but actually uses it primarily for governing "chemical reactions" between colliding particles. Much of the design work and some of the coding is done; however the remaining coding, some testing and some initial result taking are expected to dominate much of the start of this year. James never ceases to bore us with the fact that a derivative of computational methods used at the very dawn of computing in the 1940s and '50s, can still be relevant today and used on the latest hardware.
Last but not least, we have a new addition to the team. Krista Jones joined the team during September 2012 and is studying for a PhD. She will be researching the mechanisms involved in the production of hydroxyaluminosilicates (HAS) and the therapeutic potential of silicic acid in neurodegenerative disease. The purpose of this research is to discover the way in which aluminium binds to silicon to be excreted from the body, preventing and reducing aluminium accumulation in cells. Over the past few months she has been looking at silicon content in popular mineral waters using the Molybdenum Blue reaction and analysis by UV-VIS spectrophotometry. Over the coming months she hopse to achieve ethical approval for her patient study, investigating the therapeutic potential of silicic acid, as well as further analysis of samples by graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrophotometry GFAAS. Go check out her bio In the group members section for more information.
