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Tuesday night Our Body Theme focuses on all things under the microscope – will scorpions answer our antibiotic problem? How can we cheat virus infections? And how does microscopy help us answer these questions? If you’re feeling brave come hungry and taste some scorpions for yourselves, learn about drug discovery, and see with your own eyes the power of the microscope.
How a new age of microscopes are helping us to understand small structures.
Rebecca Perrin
(PhD Student)
Rebecca Perrin is a PhD student at the Leeds Institute of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences at the University of Leeds. Rebecca looks at the antennae of the cells, called primary cilia, which can be involved in many diseases such as: Meckel-Gruber syndrome and cancer. Recent advances in microscope technologies have meant that a lot more information can be gathered about small structures like cilia. Rebecca uses these microscopes to look at cilia in greater detail than ever before, and can now start to unpick what goes wrong in disease.
Medicine from Poisons: Antibiotics from Scorpion Venom
Keith Miller
(Senior Lecturer)
Antibiotics are rarely out of the news, with an increasing number of nasty bugs that can’t be killed with any of the drugs we throw at them! We need new antibiotics… AND FAST!! But how? It’s costly and unattractive to pharmaceutical companies… they want to make BIG profits and antibiotics just don’t bring in the cash!
In his research group, Dr Miller has been trying to isolate new antibiotics from the obvious place…snake and scorpion venoms! Some substances in these venoms have good antibacterial properties and there is a great potential for them to be medicines in the future!
In his research group, Dr Miller has been trying to isolate new antibiotics from the obvious place…snake and scorpion venoms! Some substances in these venoms have good antibacterial properties and there is a great potential for them to be medicines in the future!
Viral invasion and the aliens within
Prof Jonathan Ball
(Professor of Molecular Virology)
Viruses will kill you or at the very least make you very, very ill. In this lifelong fight for survival, it’s them or you... Or is it? Does it really make sense for these invisible foes to lay you low? Or are there better ways to survive? Join me on a journey through viral history – charting the emergence of deadly diseases like Ebola and pondering what might happen to HIV if we let nature take its course. And if you want a clue – then look deep inside yourselves. You really are an alien or at least a part of you certainly is…
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