My colleagues and I at The Karolinska Institute have just published a review article in the Journal of Materials Chemistry B entitled “Organic Bioelectronics in Infection”.
This is a really good overview of the field of Organic Bioelectronics from the infection perspective. We aim to explain how Organic Bioelectronics can be used to both study and treat infection.
The field of Organic Bioelectronics grew up around neuroscience, despite the wide reaching applications in other fields. This is great for us as infection biologists because we can build directly on the work that has already been done in the field of neuroscience. We can take discoveries and devices and use them directly in our infection models.
If you don’t know what organic bioelectronics is or you are frustrated with current methods and models for studying infections you should take a look at this review. Hopefully it will inspire you to look for answers in the rapidly growing field of Organic Bioelectronics.
If you have any questions then feel free to contact me and check out the article here.
Course Organiser for “Cellular and molecular infection biology” at Karolinska Institute
I’ve recently taken over a course with 2 of my colleagues at The Karolinska Institute called Cellular and molecular infection biology.
It’s going to run for two weeks in the Autumn of 2015 and should be a lot of fun. We’ll be inviting speakers from around Europe to give 2 lectures, an introductory lecture to cover some of the foundations of their field. Then they will give a second lecture which will be more like a research seminar and will centre around the cutting edge research that they are doing.
If you’re a student and you like to register, please get in touch.
Course Syllabus Here
Becoming Public Information Officer for the Swedish Medical Nanoscience Center
As part of my professional development at Karolinska Institutet, I’ve tried to learn a lot about what makes science successful. It’s very interesting to me how some studies seem to have a “wow” factor and immediately get picked up by many different media outlets. It’s also interesting that some good studies simply don’t get talked about in the media or even in the scientific literature. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we have to be aware how our research is perceived by the outside world if we want to be successful. Funding bodies and employers now care much more about outreach and impact because it is an easy way to make scientists accountable for the money that they spend.
So I began to learn how to interact with the media and how to convert our scientific publications into more digestible formats that can be consumed by a wide audience. As such I have been made Public Information Officer for the Swedish Medical Nanoscience Center. I hope to develop a potent skill set that will help me to communicate the value of my research more effectively in the future, as well as helping the Center to get more exposure in the popular press.
New paper published in Methods X
I recently published a methods paper in the new Elsevier journal Methods X. This is a really exciting paper for me as the work would probably have never been published if it wasn’t for this new journal with a very interesting mission – to publish the “hidden gems” from your lab book.
The articles tend to be brief with no introduction. They simply report on small customisations to methods that are important enough to be shared but perhaps not big enough to fit, or be noticed in a larger publication. Publishing small methods online is not such a new phenomenon, in fact the internet is awash with protocols available on a number of very useful websites. However, in a lot of cases there is no review process and no way of verifying the methods presented. This is problematic as we cannot cite people and give them recogonition or know if the information is any good.
So, with the group at the Karolinska, we wrote up an observation by Haris Antypas that different FBS preparations stimulate epithelial cells in different ways. This is important because in our lab, we study the effect of bacteria on the stimulation of epithelial cells and FBS is a common and very important additive to cell growth media. If FBS is stimulating cells, then it can be very difficult to see any effect in our experiments.
Anecdotally, it seems that many people have this kind of problem but until now, it hasn’t really been worth writing it up into a manuscript — there was nowhere for it to go. But now there is and I look forward to seeing what kind of methods begin to be published in MethodsX.
Have a look at the Full Text of our article here.
Joining Medeon Business Incubator
I will be attending workshops and working partially at Medeon Business Incubator in Malö in the south of Sweden. Within my group at the Karolinska, we are fortunate enough to work on projects that yield patents, as well as academic publications. During my visits to Medeon, I will be exploring how we can apply and commercialise these patents.
I’m looking forward to getting started, I’ve always had an interest in business and it is exciting to see how I can personally combine academia and commercialisation. I know that I’ll be learning from the best in Malmö, I just hope I can understand the Skånska Swedish dialect!