Stage 2 undegraduate Ellen Green will be joining our group for a summer project. She will be working with Caitlin on particle tracking marine, freshwater and snow algae. She will also be doing some labwork with algae (a new experience for a maths student!). Welcome Ellen! Thank you for the School of Maths, Stats and Physics for supporting this project.
The kids at the ‘Meet the Microswimmers’ Discover Festival workshops today were amazing. They loved building 3D printed microscopes; exploring sand, moss and mint leaf samples; and seeing microalgae 🦠swimming live using an Openflexure microscope 🔬. Thanks to the Pocketscope Team: Caitlin de Vries, Cameron Read, Jason Bains, Joe Zhang, Tom Coulson, Gary Caldwell, Paul Branch, and Adam Wollman for making this happen!
Congratulations to Jason on the publication of his second paper in PLoS Pathogens! This paper considers the amoeba🦠C.owczarzaki, which is a predator of diverse organisms, including the schistosome parasites that reside with it in Biomphalaria glabrata snails. Experiments by Sonya Quick and others in the Gerdt group showed that the amoeba is both chemotactic and chemokinetic, and our simulations predicted that even just the latter is beneficial to predation. This was a wonderful serendipitous collaboration with the Gerdt lab at Indiana University.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1013440
Jason’s first paper was published today in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, as a contribution to a theme issue ‘Biological fluid dynamics: emerging directions’. In thjs paper we predict the drift velocity of bacterial populations in spatio-temporally varying chemical environments, e.g. the rhizosphere 🌱. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2024.0261
Jason and I travelled the The James Hutton Institute this week to meet with Douglas McKenzie founder of Xanthella Ltd. Some very interesting discussions around photobioreactors and agritech. Jason is shown below in front of an experimental greenhouse where potatoes were growing. Our Business Innovation and Skills manager Matthew Linsley also joined us for one day. We acknowledge Newcastle University HEIF funds for supporting this visit.
