UCL RESEARCH DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, EVOLUTION AND ENVIRONMENT

18 April 2012 - For his article,  Energetics and genetics across the prokaryote-eukaryote divide, we are delighted to announce that Dr Nick Lane has won the Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution Research Award for their 6th Annual Research Awards. Nick will now be immediately shortlisted for the prestigious BioMed Central Research Award. The winner of this award will be announced at the BioMed Central Research Awards ceremony.

Our congratulations go to Daniel Pearce who has been awarded a grant of £319,330  from BBSRC for a 3 year project working on 'The effect of calorie restriction on mouse haematopoietic and skeletal muscle stem cells'. 

Congratulations to Dr Helena Cocheme (Partridge Lab) on the publication of her paper entitled 'Using the mitochondria-targeted ratiometric mass spectrometry probe MitoB to measure H(2)O(2) in living Drosophila' in Nature Protocols.  Read more...

Different genes mutate at different rates, in the bacterium E. coli.
Credit: EMBL / I. Martincorena.

UCL and GEE are very proud and delighted to announce that Prof Steve Jones, former Head of Department, has been welcomed as a Fellow of The Royal Society, along with Prof Gabriel Waksman (Head of Department, Structural and Molecular Biology).

GEE welcomes Dr Susmita Datta, the new UGl Genetics Institute Manager, who succeeds Clare Glen who has taken up a new appointment in UCL, Maple House.

28 March 2012: Origin of Modern Cows Traced to Single Herd Professor Mark Thomas (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment) co-authors genetic study showing all modern domesticated cows are descended from a single herd of wild ox, which lived 10,500 years ago.

21 March 2012
Warmest congratulations go to Dr Nick Lane, Professor John Ward (Dept of Structural and Molecular Biology) and Prof Julian Evans (Dept of Chemistry) who are co-recipients on a Leverhulme Trust research grant of up to £248,883 over three years for 'A far-from-equilibrium reactor to investigate the origin of life'.

- "A baby born tonight will live on average five hours longer than a baby born last night. Why and how is life expectancy increasing so quickly? How much of this extended life will be in good health? What do we really understand about the mechanisms of ageing?" David Gems and Matt Piper will be speaking on this topic at the Cheltenham Science Festival on 15th June 2012.

7th March - Warmest congratulations go to Dr Matt Piper who has been awarded a grant of £138,100 for three years from the Royal Society to work on: "Characterising the mechanisms underlying lifespan / fecundity trade-offs"

Head of Department, Professor Andrew Pomiankowski, welcomed the first of three new Professorial Chairs to the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment. Professor Nicholas Luscombe (Chair of Computational Biology) joins us from the EBI Cambridge  as part of the UCL Genetics Institute. Nick is a joint appointment with CRUK's London Research Institute which will mature into the Crick in a few years. He will be joined in April by Professor Judith Mank (Chair of Evolutionary and Comparative Biology) from the University of Oxford and Professor Kate Jones (Chair of Ecology and Biodiversity) from the Institute of Zoology.

GEE is delighted to announce the appointment of Kate Jones, Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity.

Kate’s research focuses on understanding the processes driving global patterns of biodiversity, understanding the impacts on services that ecosystems provide and developing innovative ways of monitoring biodiversity. Since completing her PhD in 1998 investigating the evolution of bats, Kate has worked at Imperial College London and University of Virginia, US investigating mammalian biodiversity and evolution before moving to an Earth Institute Fellowship at Columbia University in New York where she shifted her focus to understanding the importance of biodiversity in underpinning ecosystem services, particularly emerging infectious diseases. Kate moved back to London in 2005 to continue her research at The Zoological Society of London, becoming a senior research fellow in 2008. Kate moves to UCL as Chair of Ecology and Biodiversity in the UCL Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment and will hold a joint appointment with the Zoological Society of London. Prof. Jones was awarded the Leverhulme Prize for outstanding contributions to Zoology in 2008, holds two UK IT Industry prizes for her ‘iBats app’ a citizen science smartphone application for monitoring bat acoustic sounds, and is also the current Chair of the Bat Conservation Trust.  

GEE is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Judith Mank, new Professor of Evolutionary and Comparative Biology, who with her group, will join us in April 2012. 

GEE/UGI are delighted to announce the appointment of Nicholas (Nick) Luscombe, Professor of Computational Biology, who with his group, joined us on 1 March 2012. 

Congratulations to Tosin Taiwo, PhD student in Daniel Pearce's lab, whose first paper on Methylome analysis using MeDIP-seq with low DNA concentrations has been published in Nature.

Read UCL's PI Newspaper article, March 2012, here

Our warmest congratulations go to GEE's Dr Paola Oliveri on taking on this important role (from Profesor Andrew Pomiankowski, who was interim Chair).

Warmest congratulations go to Carl Smith, and thanks also to his Principal Supervisor, Professor Andrew Pomiankowski and co-supervisors/tutors Dr Duncan Greig & Dr Max Reuter.

8 November 2011

Warmest congratulations go to GEE's Dr Matthew Piper and Dr Nichola Raihani who were appointed University Research Fellows (URFs) for 2011.

University College London and King’s College London, together with the Royal Veterinary College, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Birkbeck College and the School of Pharmacy, have developed a major new, interdisciplinary PhD programme in bioscience and bioengineering. Research projects will fall within the BBSRC science remit. For full details of programme structure, funding/eligibility & how to apply, please visit the website.  Deadline for applications: 5pm, 16 January 2012.

8 December 2011

Why are there two sexes? It’s a question that has long perplexed generations of scientists, but researchers from UCL have come up with a radical new answer: mitochondria.

A GEE team led by Dr Nik Maniatis [Heather Elding (PhD student), Winston Lau (PostDoc), Prof Dallas Swallow and Nik] have recently made important progress on the way to dissect the genetics of complex inheritance.

The Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment is launching a new MRes in Biodiversity, Evolution and Conservation, to start in the 2012/13 academic year. This programme provides training in scientific approaches to studying and preserving biodiversity. The research led programme covers both basic research on the evolutionary and ecological processes that produced our present biodiversity, and applied research on how to preserve this biodiversity in the future.

Although 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, the microbiology of the water-air interface has been largely ignored. To redress this important omission, a paper on natural surface films by Roger Wotton and Terry Preston has been selected for the publication "Topics in Prokaryotic and Virus Biology" published recently by the University of California Press:view article