Issue
Eight
Life Sciences: SULSA under the microscope
There is no doubt that the advances in life sciences will be crucial for providing us with the tools to overcome the great challenges that we face in the 21st Century to secure a healthy, prosperous and sustinable future…
Foreword It has been Scottish Funding Council policy for the past five years to invest selectively, in partnership with the Scottish Universities, in key resea...
Piecing together the biological jigsaw The challenge for SULSA Director Mike Tyers is not just to pursue his own specialist interests (focusing on systems biology and cell division) but als...
What is synthetic biology? What’s new about synthetic biology is that instead of using genetic material from existing organisms, it uses computers to design new DNA sequen...
SULSA on a voyage of discovery It may have “more ideas than money,” but the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (SULSA) is also an idea whose time may have come...
Origami for proteins One of SULSA’s latest recruits, Professor Neil Bulleid recently returned to Glasgow where he did his PhD in biochemistry in 1985. In his n...
Shedding light on nature's secrets Just like human beings, plants are complex systems which respond to changes in their environment by initiating different processes and types of behavi...
Decisions, decisions Peter Swain is intrigued by how cells make decisions, but one decision in his life was easy – to come to Scotland as a SULSA professor, based in...
Mind-expanding science When you find out that biologists are studying cannabinoids, you may think that science is ‘going to pot,’ but if they can understand what...
All systems go Even ten years ago, systems biology was regarded by many researchers as more science fiction than science, but now it has become an indispensable part...
The philosopher researcher Within five years, the pharmaceutical industry will see about 40 per cent of its patents lose most of their value overnight. Meanwhile, drug dis...
Lost and found in translation The first SULSA Symposium in June 2009 in Edinburgh provided a platform for some of Europe’s leading researchers in cell, systems and translatio...