News in 2024

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Melanie Roffet-Salque awarded £1m NERC grant for studying ancient milk consumption

Dr Melanie Roffet-Salque has been awarded a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Pushing the Frontiers grant worth £1m on milk consumption.

The project is entitled "NeoCalcium - Investigating milk consumption by Neolithic farmers using a novel Calcium isotope proxy".

This project will calibrate a novel and quantitative calcium (Ca) isotope proxy for individual milk consumption using Ca isotope composition of skeletal remains.

For the first time, this will permit direct assessment of the extent to which lactase persistence (LP) influences milk-drinking behaviour in a prehistoric context.

The NeoCalcium project is in collaboration with Professor Tim Elliott and Dr Jamie Lewis (School of Earth Sciences), Professor George Davey-Smith (Bristol Medical School) and Professor Mark Thomas​ (University College London).

The project is expected to start in August 2025 and run for three years.

Wuge Briscoe awarded funding to lead project on molecular interactions initiating dengue viral replication

Professor Wuge Briscoe has been awarded a three-year responsive mode EPSRC-SFI grant to lead a project titled “Understanding Molecular Interactions Initiating Adsorption of Viral Capsid Proteins on Lipid Droplets (MIrACLe)” alongside Professor Jian Lu (University of Manchester) and Dr David Cheung (University of Galway).

The grant (with an Full Economic Costing value of £1.33m including £266K contribution from Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI)) will aim to probe molecular interactions underpinning the initial step in dengue viral replication, bringing to bear quantitative experimental and computational methods in biophysics, soft matter, and colloid science to directly access molecular structures and interactions at complex interfaces.

The work in Bristol will focus on direct measurements using the surface force apparatus, complemented by X-ray and neutron scattering at UK and EU central facilities, to study the molecular mechanisms underpinning adsorption of the dengue viral capsid protein on the lipid droplet membrane.

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