Dr Samantha Pitt has been elected as a board member of the International Society for Zinc Biology (http://iszb.org/). She will serve the Society for 2 years. She is very excited to contribute towards the future direction of the Society and will work to raise  the  awareness  of  the scientific  community  regarding  the  importance  of  zinc  in  health  and  disease.

The Metal Ions in Medicine group would like to say a big congratulations to (Dr) Amelie Sobczak on passing her PhD viva!!

The Metal Ions in Medicine group would like to say a big congratulations to Gavin Robertson on passing his PhD viva.

Dr Alan Stewart represented the Metal Ions in Medicine team at the Obesity and Diabetes Conference in Rome held between 25th-26th Februray 2019. Whilst there he gave a keynote talk titled “Influence of free fatty acids on plasma zinc handling by albumin: Impact on coagulation in diabetes”. As an organising committe member he would like to thank all who attended and presented during the meeting.

Dendritic cells are key immune cells that respond to pathogens and co-ordinate many innate and adaptive immune responses. Dr Swati Arya and Dr Dagmara Wiatrek-Moumoulidis from the Stewart group, together with Dr Simon Powis and researchers from the Mass Spectrometry team in St Andrews (led Dr Sally Shirran) have used SWATH-MS to quantitively measure proteomic changes that occur in monocyte-derived dendritic cells (moDCs) following activation by lipopolysaccharide (LPS). A moDC library of 4,666 proteins was generated and proteins were quantified at 0, 6 and 24 h post-LPS stimulation using SWATH-MS. Functional annotation of proteins exhibiting significant changes in expression between the various time points led to the identification of clusters of proteins implicated in distinct cellular processes including interferon and interleukin signalling, endocytosis, the ER-phagosome pathway and antigen-presentation. This study provides new detailed insight into the global proteomic changes that occur in moDCs during antigen processing and presentation and further demonstrate the potential of SWATH-MS for the quantitative study of proteins involved in cellular processes. This work will be published in the online open-access journal, Scientific Reports.

The Metal Ions in Medicine team  attended the 2019 Zinc-net meeting in Cambridge, UK. This International meeting focused on investigating the role of zinc in biological systems. Dr Samantha Pitt gave the opening plenary lecture. The title of her talk was “Altered Zn²⁺ homeostasis in Niemann-Pick C1 disease results in impaired NAADP-mediated lysosomal Ca²⁺-dynamics”. Dr Alan Stewart gave a talk titled “Influence of free fatty acids on plasma zinc handling by albumin: Impact on coagulation in type II diabetes”. Gavin Robertson (BHF funded PhD student in the Pitt lab) presented a poster titled “Mitsugumin 23: a cardiac sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca²⁺ leak channel that displays Zn²⁺ permeability”.

The team would like to thank Dr Nick Pugh (Anglia Ruskin University) for organising this meeting.

On 26th November Dr Alan Stewart attended a networking dinner at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh to help launch a new charity focused on developing a cure for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a debilitating eye disease that affects millions of people worldwide. In the UK alone there are more than 685,000 people with significant sight loss as a consequence of late-stage AMD. The new charity has been founded by four leading site loss charities, Blind Veterans UK, Fight for Sight, the Macular Society and Scottish War Blinded.

During a recent trip to the USA, Dr Alan Stewart visited the laboratory of Prof Wladek Minor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Virginia – Charlotteslville and on the 15th November gave a seminar there entitled “Allosteric regulation of plasma zinc dynamics by free fatty acids: A potential driver of cardiovascular complications in disease states”. He then went on to Dallas, Texas to attend the Proteomics-2018 conference (19th-20th November) where he gave an invited talk entitled “The hydroxyapatite interactome in age-related macular degeneration”.

Amy Dorward (Pitt Research group) took part in the Dundee Science festival 7^th October 2018. She volunteered at the British Heart Foundation’s “Air Street”. The exhibit focussed on the silent harmful effects air pollution has on the cardiovascular system. Visitors walked ‘outside’ along “BHF Air Street” – where posters outlined the main links of pollution and cardiovascular disease – before coming ‘inside’ to the “BHF sitting room” – where they learned more about the research being carried out by the BHF in their local area. Visitors were also given the opportunity to look at diseased and healthy heart cell cells under the microscope, measure their own heart rates and learn about how the heart works through a variety of activities. Amy really enjoyed volunteering at the festival and she is grateful to have had the opportunity to talk about some of the cardiovascular research being carried out in University of St Andrews.

Congratulations to Dr Swati Arya who was awarded a £5,000 grant at the School of Medicine Research Away Day held at the Byre Theatre. Swati made a successful pitch for the cash at a Dragons Den-style event. The funding will be spent on a new collaborative pilot project (with Dr Peter Caie and Dr Alan Stewart, both University of St Andrews and Dr Margaret Dunne, Trinity College Dublin) focussed on identifying early biomarkers for esophageal cancer using SWATH-MS. Swati also gave a talk at the event entitled “The hydroxyapatite interactome in age-related macular degeneration”.