Post-doc Appreciation Week Pizza & Beer Seminar

Evolution has favoured those that can predict the periodic variation in our environment such as the day:night cycle and time their behaviours and physiological processes accordingly. Hence many organisms have developed a biological clock with a period of ~24hours. This clock needs constant fine tuning to time behaviours/physiological processes to the appropriate time of day. One of the main sources of information is light variation. Whilst much is known about how brightness effect the clock, little is known about how daily variation in spectral composition (‘colour’) may effect it.

Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is the gold-standard noninvasive technique for measuring vessel blood flow. The application of CMR in the fetal circulation has recently become feasible. Its use has allowed the assessment of normal fetal blood flow and the heamodynamics of the fetal circulation in the setting of congenital heart disease and fetal growth restriction. Here the technique has been used in animal models in order to provide a useful new tool for assessing the circulatory characteristics of fetal animal models of human disease.

Investigating the pathophysiology of brain haemorrhage in a mammalian model is difficult, time consuming and expensive. By developing a 3D model of the bleed and surrounding damaged tissue, using alginate based hydrogels, we can investigate cell population interactions and how neurons recover from injury without invasive surgery.