Category: Archive

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Getting your hands on one of the coveted LEGO™ catalogues, full of marvels and usually conveniently found in toy shops, was always considered a lucky day in my house. Discussions about new models with friends and family and overturning our LEGO™ collections to build something even remotely similar invariably ensued.  My prime objective was having fun, so only in hindsight is it that I learned about all the positive effects playing with the colourful building blocks was supposed to have: improving spatial sense, honing fine motor skills and encouraging creativity. Now that I’m working in a lab full time, incidentally these are all skills I am using every day, from figuring out how a molecule might bind to a receptor to pipetting a truly minuscule amount of reagent. After facing repeated criticism for targeting their marketing campaigns increasingly towards boys, with their ranges targeted at girls often portraying harmful gender stereotypes, LEGO™ even introduced a mini-figure range of female scientists.

But LEGO™ is not only a thing to be enjoyed when you’re a child – researchers all over the world are using the brick-based toy for their own purposes. A group of researchers in Canada uses a lego-built model to teach first year medical students how to interview a patient most effectively. And – maybe not surprisingly – it turns out that building space-filling protein models out of LEGO™ is not only a more reliable way to teach protein synthesis but also might be a quick way to generate 3D geometric models of various compounds you want to visualise.

This weekend the Centre for Life, the beloved science museum of Newcastle, reopens its doors with its new exhibition North East LEGO™ Landmarks. Why don’t you check it out for yourself? I’m sure I will.

https://pixabay.com/en/lego-doll-the-per-amphitheatre-1044891/

 

Papers:
Using LEGO™ to teach med students how to talk to patients: Harding, Sheila Rutledge, and Marcel F. D’Eon. “Using a LegoTM-Based Communications Simulation to Introduce Medical Students to Patient-Centered Interviewing.” Teaching and learning in medicine 13, no. 2 (2001): 130-135.

Teaching Protein Synthesis using LEGO™: Templin, Mark A., and Marcia K. Fetters. “A working model of protein synthesis using LegoTM building blocks.” The American Biology Teacher 64, no. 9 (2002): 673-678.

Using LEGO™ as inspiration for a 3D modelling system: Eng, Markus, Ken Camarata, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, and Mark D. Gross. “Flexm: Designing a physical construction kit for 3d modeling.” International Journal of Architectural Computing 4, no. 2 (2006): 27-47.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Science is serious business. Why else would people toil over experiments until deep into the night, read papers until their eyes go red and devote their lives to researching the specifics a single protein?  And it can’t be denied that scientists have been given some really hard nuts to crack, from the specific health challenges of an ageing population to emerging viruses such as ebola. But sometimes it is nice to remember that science – in its very heart – is still about being curious about our everyday surroundings and trying to understand them to the best of our abilities. I here present to you five published papers that ask the real questions and finally give us the – sometimes surprising – answers.

• An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces (Harvey et al., 2002)
  You might laugh now, but did you ever try to get a very unwilling sheep to get its yearly haircut? The trick seems to be a slightly sloped surface…

• The nature of navel fluff (Steinhauser 2009)
  What the nature of navel fluff? This study brings us a bit closer to understanding this phenomenon and shows that old shirts produce more naval fluff than new ones. It actually hypothesises that naval fluff has a cleaning function? Pretty neat.

• Pressures produced when penguins pooh – calculations on avian defecation (Meyer-Rochow et al., 2003)
  I’m sure these penguins from the coronation islands in the south Orkneys would love some information how to being covered in poo. Not sure how you might ever need this information, but make sure to check out the original paper – the figures are amazingly informative…

• Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of bearded men (Barbeito et al., 1967)
  Apparently beards are able to harbour a variety of microorganisms you can pick up in microbiological lab – even washing merely reduces chances of unwittingly infecting others.

• Physics take the biscuit (Fisher, 1999)
  Finally, the physical formula on achieving biscuit-in-tea-dunking perfection! Not always quite applicable maybe, the author advises that best results could be achieved when always having a thermometer on you for taking the exact temperature of the tea into account before dunking your digestive.

Reference List:

Harvey, J. T., Culvenor, J., Payne, W., Cowley, S., Lawrance, M., Stuart, D., & Williams, R. (2002). An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces. Applied ergonomics, 33(6), 523-531.

Steinhauser, G. (2009). The nature of navel fluff. Medical hypotheses, 72(6), 623-625.

Meyer-Rochow, V. B., & Gal, J. (2003). Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation. Polar Biology, 27(1), 56-58.

Barbeito, M. S., Mathews, C. T., & Taylor, L. A. (1967). Microbiological laboratory hazard of bearded men. Applied microbiology, 15(4), 899-906.

Fisher, L. (1999). Physics takes the biscuit. Nature, 397(6719), 469-469.

By Leonie Schittenhelm

Research at Newcastle University shows how algae-gels could lead the way in treating blindness with stem cell therapy

When Vanna Belton, a woman from Baltimore, was the first woman to regain her eyesight due to stem cell treatment earlier this year, excitement ensued. The possibility to repair diseased or damaged tissue using an individual’s own stem cells seemed close at hand. But while success of the treatment was undisputed, researching scientists can still not reliably explain exactly why improvement of eyesight in around 60% of patients occurs. Other studies have shown that reliably differentiating pluripotent stem cells into the coveted retinal cells, which are lost in many conditions leading to blindness, still poses a huge problem.

A group of researchers working alongside Prof. Majilinda Lako, Professor of Stem Cell Science at Newcastle University, have made a decisive step towards solving this problem. In a paper published earlier this month, they were able to show that growing human pluripotent stem cells in a gel obtained from brown seaweed significantly increased the amount of stem cells developing into pigmented retinal cells, similar to the ones found in the human eye. In addition to using the algae gel this was achieved by growing the cells in a so-called 3D culture, which had stem cells fully encapsulated within the gel for protection from external forces.

While stem cell treatment remains controversial, understanding how these cells could be safely and reliably used for therapy makes a tremendous difference and provides relief for people suffering from progressive sight loss. The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) predicts that rates of sight loss could increase dramatically within the ageing population of the UK, with estimates predicting the number of people affected by age-related blindness to double by 2050. Research in Newcastle will continue on this exciting topic, as it is hoped that the algae-gel could not only be useful for growing but also for transport and transplantation of retinal stem cells.

Check out the paper: Hunt, N. C., Hallam, D., Karimi, A., Mellough, C. B., Chen, J., Steel, D. H., & Lako, M. (2016). 3D culture of human pluripotent stem cells in RGD-alginate hydrogel improves retinal tissue development. Acta Biomaterialia.