The 2016 Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) predicts that, unless action is taken, around 10 million deaths per year will be attributable to AMR by the year 2050. The pipeline of new antibiotics is limited, hence the potential of numerous alternatives to antibiotics – “noncompound approaches (i.e. products other than …
Biomimetic liquid crystalline systems are widely used in skin care cosmetics and topical pharmaceutical preparations. Multi-component lipid/surfactant formulations that contain natural phospholipids combined with long chain fatty acids and alcohols are widely employed in so-called ‘biomimetic’ skin care preparations. Such products – which include, for example, the PhysiogelTM and BiophilicTM …
Bile salts (BS) are biosurfactants released into the small intestine, which play key and contrasting roles in lipid digestion: they adsorb at interfaces and promote the adsorption of digestive enzymes onto fat droplets, while they also remove lipolysis products from that interface, solubilising them into mixed micelles. Small architectural variations …
Miruna Serian has joined our group in order to do her first rotation project as part of the LIDo DTP PhD programme. During her rotation Miruna will be working with us and the group of James Mason in the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science at King’s College London. During her rotation, …
In this manuscript, we present important findings of how lipid heterogeneity in model lipid membranes affect various structural and dynamic properties of the lipids within the membranes . We report the results of large-scale all-atom molecular dynamics simulations of commonly used simple model lipid membranes as well as two complex …
In our latest papers, we have participated in a multi-disciplinary collaboration investigating how type-1 innate lymphoid cells (ILC1) drive gut epithelial and matrix remodelling through TGFβ1 and MMP9, which has implications for patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). We used coarse-grain molecular dynamics simulations to gain an understanding of the …
Sphingomyelin and cholesterol are prominent lipids in the plasma membrane of animal cells. In this manuscript, we have combined X-ray scattering experiments, performed by our collarborator Prof. Peter Quinn (KCL, Institute of Pharmaceutical Science), and all-atom molecular dynamics to investigate the bilayer structures observed within an equimolar mixture of palmitoylsphingomyelin …
Lipid droplets are cytoplasmic organelles that store neutral lipids (e.g. triacylglycerols & sterol esters) that serve as reservoirs of energy. The neutral lipid core of lipid droplets are bounded by a phospholipid monolayer, which differentiates them from most other organelles that have a bilayer membrane. There are various nano-environments of …
On 31 January, Irene Marzuoli, who was co-supervised by Prof. Franca Fraternali in the Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biology, was examined by Prof. Syma Khalid (University of Southampton) and Prof. Fernando Bresme (Imperial College London) during her PhD viva. Irene’s viva was during the afternoon, and in the end the examiners …
We are excited that our recent paper in which we reported the results of a multi-disciplinary investigation of the antimicrobial activity of protein pseudocapsids (ACS Nano (2020) 14, 1609-1622) has been garnering a lot of attention within the media and the scientific community since its publication. This paper contained simulation …