Research scientists based at the Research Complex at Harwell have won the top poster prizes at this year’s British Crystallographic Association Spring Meeting for their research in antibacterial peptides and bacterial conjugation. Dr Satomi Inaba-Inoue won both the BSG David Blow Poster Prize and BCA Group Poster Prize sponsored by Calibre Scientific, whilst PhD student Chloe Seddon won Best Flash Presentation at this year’s meeting, which was held at the University of Leeds from 11th-14th April 2022. Satomi and Chloe are both part of Dr Konstantinos Beis’ group at Imperial College London, based here at Research Complex whose primary research focuses on membrane protein structural biology.
Chloe won Best Flash Presentation, a competition held for the Young Crystallographers Group (YCG), where members of the YCG compete for 30 seconds to sell their poster.
Satomi’s poster was based on a recent paper published in Science Advances, Molecular mechanism of SbmA, a promiscuous transporter exploited by antimicrobial peptides’ and Chloe’s presentation was based on her PhD work.
The BSG David Blow Prize is awarded annually to the best poster presented at the meeting. David Blow was a renowned British biophysicist, best known for the development of X-ray crystallography, a technique used to determine the molecular structure of thousands of biological molecules. This technique has proved hugely important to the pharmaceutical industry. The prize itself is a trophy comprising a piece of Blue John crystal mounted on an oak plinth, both items being donated by Peter Harrison, the owner of the Treak Cliff Cavern at Castletown. The poster prize is sponsored by the PDBe. Further history of the prize is available here.
Image: Copyright of Research Complex at Harwell