Category Archives: News

Dr Jennifer Tullett

Lifespan Prolonged by Inhibiting Common Enzyme

An enzyme called RNA polymerase III (Pol III) that is present in most cells across all animal species, including ourselves has previously been known to be essential for making proteins and for cell growth. Its involvement in ageing however was under-explored until now.

The study involved Dr Jennifer Tullet of the University’s School of Biosciences. Led by a team from University College London (UCL) and also involving the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Jenny and colleagues found that the survival of yeast cells and the lifespans of flies and worms were extended by an average of 10% following a modest reduction in Pol III activity in adulthood.

The effects of inhibiting Pol III were found to be comparable to the action of the immune-suppressing drug rapamycin, which has previously been shown to extend the lifespans of mice and many other animals. This discovery will help scientists understand the mechanism of action of drugs, such as rapamycin, that show promise for extending the lifespans of mammals.

Jenny said that it was ‘amazing’ that one small genetic adjustment can impact so positively on lifespan and intestinal health. Understanding more about the underlying molecules at work promises new strategies for anti-ageing therapies.

The team now plan to continue their work on Pol III to understand its function in an adult organism and hence shed light on how a reduction in its activity can extend lifespan.

The research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Royal Society, the Medical Research Council, the EU’s Horizon 2020 and UCL.

The paper, entitled Longevity by RNA polymerase III inhibition downstream of TORC1 (Danny Filer, Maximillian Thompson, Vakil Takhaveev, Adam Dobson, Ilektra Kotronaki, James Green, Matthias Heinemann, Jennifer Tullet and Nazif Alic) was published in Nature.

 

http://www.publicnow.com/view/C8984BDE9F4D2C1AA638F20C40E58288D2C9ED69?2017-11-30-11:00:19+00:00-xxx5648

Protest Image

Abortion, Booze and Father’s day

Professor Ellie Lee has been active in the press over the summer – commenting on a number of controversial stories.

In “Why, 50 years after the Abortion Act, it’s time to abolish the law altogether” she said There have been 50 or 60 abortion bills put to the house since 1967, and they’ve all tried to restrict access to abortion. I think this is the first time there has been a genuinely liberalising reform bill.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/25/abortion-act-law-50-years-terminations-criminal-stigmatised

She commented in the story “BABY BOOZE How much alcohol units can you drink when pregnant, how much is safe and what is foetal alcohol syndrome?”

https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/4036330/alcohol-drinking-pregnant-foetal-alcohol-syndrome-safe/

And in “Can we just keep the politics out of Father’s Day?” – The mother-child interaction has become a laboratory, where politicians, professionals and experts of all kinds ­experiment about an expanding range of problems, real or imagined

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/can-we-just-keep-the-politics-out-of-fathers-day/news-story/5005b9036a1a1baeef101f4177800e1a

 

Poetry Event

University Scientists’ Role in Canterbury Arts Festival

Scientists Dr Alessia Buscaino, Professor Darren Griffin, Dr Neil Kad and Dr Gary Robinson – alongside Professor Charlotte Sleigh of the School of History – explored their scientific passions with poets in the science-poetry slam Experimental Words on 1st  November, 20.00 at Canterbury Cathedral Lodge).

Biology met balladry, physics encountered pentameter, and chemistry confronted cadence as Kent’s leading scientists were paired with Canterbury’s finest spokenword artists – and challenged to create new microperformances.

The result? A diverse display of rhyme, rhythm and reason, which celebrated the creative similarities between science and the performing arts.

Hosted by scientific poet and former Canterbury Laureate Dan Simpson and poetry slam-winning scientist Dr. Sam Illingworth, this was an evening of precise delights and unexpected insights.

 

https://www.publicnow.com/view/24502A398ADE174039913893BC1759E3C70387F0

 

Suffragette Image

50th Anniversary of the Abortion Act 1967

October marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Abortion Act 1967, a law which has had an enormous impact on the lives of women in Britain and beyond, offering a direct inspiration for reform in a number of other countries.   Working with colleagues from the University of Bristol and  the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Professor Sally Sheldon organised a two-day conference to mark the event.  The conference was sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and held at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which generously offered free use of its facilities (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/abortion-act-conference/).

The conference heard from many of those who campaigned for the introduction of the Abortion Act as well as from those who have fought to protect it over the years, including the Act’s sponsor, Lord David Steel.  Other speakers included members of the Lane Committee, which offered a significant and authoritative review of the operation of the Abortion Act in the early 1970s, senior health care professionals, a range of academic speakers, and past and current politicians who have been active in abortion law reform.

Professor Sheldon is currently conducting a major two year, AHRC-funded study of the Abortion Act.  She also spoke at a second event to commemorate the 50th anniversary, Beyond the Backstreet, organised by Abortion Rights (https://www.abortionrights.org.uk/beyond-the-backstreet/); and gave a well-attended public lecture on her research at Keele University in a series designed to mark the 50th anniversary of the Law School, where she previously taught (https://www.keele.ac.uk/law/lawschool50thanniversary/50thanniversary-newsandevents/lectureseries.html).

 

Image: ‘George Rawlinson Collection, reproduced with kind permission of the GCU archives’.

George C. Williams Prize awarded to 3 CISoR members

Congratulations go to three CISoR members from the School of Anthropology and Conservation, who were recently awarded the prestigous George C. Williams Prize, from the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health.

The prize was awarded to Sarah Myers, Dr Oskar Burger and Dr Sarah Johns for their paper entitled “Postnatal depression and reproductive success in modern, low-fertility contexts“.

Further details of the award scheme can be found here.

 

Chimpanzees modify grooming behavior when near higher ranking members

Research by Dr Nicholas Newton-Fisher from the University of Kent has found chimpanzees modify their interactions with other chimpanzees if higher ranking members of their community are nearby.

Dr Newton-Fisher, based in the School of Anthropology and Conservation (SAC), and Stefano Kaburu, from the Department of Population Health and Reproduction, School of Veterinary Medicine, UC Davis, University of California and formerly of SAC, observed grooming interactions between members of a community of chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Western Uganda.

Grooming plays a key role in chimp interactions as it helps reduce stress and remove parasites. Within chimp groups lower ranking members often groom higher ranking members in the hope of receiving benefits such as protection, acceptance and the hope of receiving reciprocal grooming.

However, Dr Newton-Fisher’s findings suggest that if another chimpanzee with a higher rank than the chimp being groomed is nearby, the grooming chimp will stop far sooner than if not.

It appears chimpanzees do this so they do not invest too much time grooming with one chimp if there is a risk the chimp being groomed will not reciprocate but instead look to groom the nearby higher-ranking chimp.

This echoes prior research by Dr Newton-Fisher which found that if a larger number of other chimpanzees are nearby then, regardless of rank, the grooming chimp would usually stop grooming sooner than if there were no other chimps nearby, or a small number.

However, this latest research focused on a group with a more defined social hierarchy, so it was the rank of the nearby chimps that was of more concern to those grooming, rather than the number of others nearby.

Taken together the findings challenge the ‘relationship model’ theory that, like other primates, chimps engage in grooming on the basis of prior social interactions.

Instead it appears they are motivated by the circumstances in which they engage in the grooming and the possible benefits they will derive, giving weight to the more economic-orientated ‘biological markets’ theory of primate social interactions.

The research has been published in the latest edition of Animal Behaviour titled Grooming decisions under structural despotism: the impact of social rank and bystanders among wild male chimpanzees.

Study of premature babies has implications for future treatment

Research carried out by the University of Kent with doctors on the neonatal unit at the William Harvey Hospital and Brunel University have provided further insight into the biology of premature birth, with findings that may have implications for treating premature babies.

The results of the research are now published in an article entitled Preterm infants have significantly longer telomeres than their term born counterparts in PLOS One.

The team from the School of Biosciences led by Professor Darren Griffin set out to look for a genetic marker that might identify “at risk” children early in life so that they could embark on monitoring and treatment at an earlier opportunity.

Focusing on the telomeres – the caps at the end of the chromosomes that degrade as people age, they compared the length of telomeres in premature babies compared to babies born at the expected time.

Three groups of infants were studied:

1. 25 babies who were born prematurely (but were assayed at the time they should have been born)

2. 22 premature babies sampled at birth

3. 31 babies (sampled at birth) born at the expected time.

The expectation was that the first group would, genetically, appear more “aged” i.e. have shorter telomeres than the others. The findings were somewhat of a surprise in that, although there was some evidence of telomeres shortening over time in the premature babies, it was the normally born ones that had the shortest telomeres of all.

These results suggest that other, as yet undiscovered, factors may influence telomere length in premature infants and raises the intriguing idea that telomere shortening rate may be influenced by the degree of prematurity of the baby.

In any event, identification of genetic differences between premature and term-born infants may identify those at most risk and hence at greater need of treatment to mitigate problems that could occur later in life.

There are well-established problems associated with premature birth including respiratory, learning and developmental disorders, as well as the more recently discovered problems inlcuding hypertension, insulin resistance and altered body fat distribution. These latter problems may suggest early ageing in premature babies.

Studies suggest that these may persist into adult life, essentially mimicking early ageing and also posing a significant public health concern.

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Preterm infants have significantly longer telomeres than their term born counterparts by Vimal Vasu, Kara Turner, Shermi George, John Greenall, Predrag Slijepcevic and Darren Griffin is published in in PLOS One.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0180082

Doctors, Conscience and Abortion Law and Practice

This event, held on 29 June 2017, brought together academics from a range of disciplines, graduate students, providers of abortion services and campaigners, to discuss abortion law and changes in abortion practice. The event was part of dissemination work for a Kent University Faculty of Social Sciences Research Fund Award, given to Ellie Lee and Sally Sheldon, for a project ‘Abortion Doctors, Professional Identity and the Law’.

 

Dr Ellie Lee

With a backdrop of the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act, and a vote at the British Medical Association Annual Conference two days previously to support the decriminalisation of abortion, participants at the event discussed: the history of the British Abortion Law; research about the motivations and experience of doctors who ‘do’, that is those who provide abortion; and research about those who ‘don’t’, with a focus on conscientious objection.

Participants were particularly privileged, at the start of the event, to hear from Malcolm Potts, a pioneer of abortion provision and law reform in Britain, and from US colleagues Dr Lori Freedman and Professor Wendy Chavkin.

Thanks to Kent Law School and British Pregnancy Advisory Service for their financial support for the event.

 

More about the event here:

Doctors, Conscience and Abortion Law and Practice

 

Key Findings Document: ‘Doctors Who Provide Abortion: Their Values and Professional Identity’

 

Published work by presenters

Potts, M. and Campbell, M. ‘History of Contraception’

http://www.24grammata.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Malcolm-Potts-and-Martha-Campbell-24grammata.com_.pdf

Sheldon, S. ‘British Abortion Law’

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2230.12180/epdf

Greasley, K. ‘Arguments About Abortion’

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/arguments-about-abortion-9780198766780?cc=gb&lang=en&

Bristow, J. ‘The Sociology of Generations’

http://www.palgrave.com/in/book/9781137601353

Freedman, L. (with Weitz and Kimport) ‘The Stratified Legitimacy of Abortions’

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022146516669970

Lee, E. ‘Constructing Abortion as a Social Problem’

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0959353516678010

Lohr, P. (with Fjerstad, De Silva and Lyus) ‘Abortion’

http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.f7553

Chavkin, W. (with Swedlow and Fifield) ‘Regulation of Conscientious Objection to Abortion’

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5473038/

Neal, M. (with Fovargue) ‘‘In Good Conscience’: Conscience-based exemptions and proper medical treatment’

https://academic.oup.com/medlaw/article-abstract/23/2/221/1325917

Mishtal, J. (with de Zordo and Anton) ‘A Fragmented Landscape’

http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/DeZordoFragmented

Furedi, A. ‘The Moral Case for Abortion’

http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137411181

Mammalian Genome Mapping Grant awarded to Kent University

Professor Darren Griffin and Dr Becky O’Connor, in collaboration with Dr Denis Larkin at the Royal Veterinary College, London have recently been awarded a 3-year BBSRC grant for a study entitled “Rapid reconstruction of reference chromosome-level mammalian genome assemblies and insight into the mechanisms of gross genomic rearrangement”

We live in an era in which the genomes of new species are being sequenced all the time. The most modern ways to sequence DNA have many advantages over older approaches (the prominent one being a vastly reduced cost) but a problem that arises each time the genome of a new species is sequenced is that assigning large blocks of sequence to an overall genomic “map” can be problematic and/or very expensive. It’s a little like finding your location on Google Maps but not being able to “zoom out” to establish where that position is in relation to the whole country. In essence, the aim of this project is to rectify this problem at one fifth of the current cost. Using our experience with birds we have developed a high-throughput approach and the tools for assigning the sequences to their proper positions in chromosomes. This involves our own adaptations to a technique called “FISH” that can take the data from sequenced genomes and visualize directly blocks of DNA sequence as they appear in their rightful place in the genome.

Sequences of the pig genome visualised on chromosomes using fluorescent probes (FISH)

 

In this study, we will focus our attention on 25 newly sequenced mammal species. More importantly however we will provide the means through which this can be achieved for any of the 5,000 living mammalian species. Mammals are important to our lives in that many are models for human disease and development and are critical to agriculture (both meat and milk). Others are threatened or endangered and, with impending global warming, molecular tools for the study of their ecology and conservation are essential. Our combined efforts have also developed computer-based browser methods to compare the overall structure of one genome with another, directly visualizing the similarities and differences between the genomes of several animals at a time, something we can share widely amongst the scientific community and general public via the world wide web. The differences between mammalian genomes arose through changes that happened during evolution. One of the main aims of this project is to find out how this occurred and what are implications of these changes. We have a number of ideas such as we think there may be different “signatures” that classify why blocks of genes tend to stay together during evolution. Armed with this information, we fully intend to take it out into the world. The devices that we will develop can be adapted for the screening of individual animals for genomic rearrangements that may cause e.g. breeding problems. Moreover, the resources we will develop provide a source for public information and student learning through a dedicated, outwardly-facing web site. We have received overwhelming support from numerous laboratories all over the world who are interested in using the resources that we will develop to ask biological questions of their own. For this reason, we feel that this project will help us understand evolution in mammals and contribute to establishing the UK as a central international hub of mammalian genomics.