February 2013

Tessa Young has started her Honours work. She is working on defining the affinities of Abeta peptides for Cu(I) using new chromophoric probes developed in the laboratory by Dr. Zhiguang Xiao.

Sarah Buckley has started her Masters project. She aims to define the affinities of the alpha-synuclein protein (associated with Parkinson’s Disease) for copper to determine if it is able to act as a catalyst to produce toxic reactive oxygen species.A paper based on the work of Zhenyu Zhi has now appeared: Z. Shi, A. G. Wedd and S. L. Gras “Parallel In Vivo DNA Assembly by Recombination: Experimental Demonstration and Theoretical Approaches” PLoS ONE 2013,8(2): e56854. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0056854.