Alex: University of Leeds

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I’m Alex, I’m a final year student at the University of Leeds.  I am an iCASE student which means my project runs in collaboration with industry. My industrial partner is Liverpool Chirochem, a specialist chemistry technology company who produce and supply small organic molecules for biotech/pharmaceutical R&D.

My project uses fluorine atoms to detect binding of small molecules to proteins, and uses NMR to measure molecular tumbling. I have developed a library of chemicals and generated mixtures of these to speed up the screening process.

Liverpool ChiroChem technologies have been great in providing highly unique chemicals for inclusion in the chemical library that were not available elsewhere and I recently completed a three month placement at their site. By using the facilities and knowledge at LCC, I was able to generate 150+ chemicals to follow up on the results of a screen, which would have normally taken me months to do using traditional methods.

Some of the highlights to the project have been screening two different proteins using the library and method developed in the earlier parts of the PhD. It was challenging to spend a lot of time completing quality control of the library, but having it pay off in getting data that was meaningful to collaborators was super rewarding.

What advice would you give someone applying to DiMeN or embarking on a biosciences PhD? 

1. Care about the project: You will have bad days where you are unmotivated. You need to have a love for it to keep going. Projects can be moved in directions you want around year 2/3 but the core concept remains. 

2. The supervisors and students: Talk to the supervisors and see what they want from the project. Are they a big lab or small lab? Do they have postdocs? Are the supervisors in the lab every day, or out getting grants for new machines? How is the lab group? All options are valid. It is just what YOU want in a group. 

3. The city and University: Is it somewhere you are happy to stay for a few years? Don’t worry too much about moving from friends, as you are sure to make more in a new university.