All around Oxford, in laboratories, in offices, in ivory towers, the University’s
academics and students are busy investigating and innovating. Wherever there are unanswered questions, where there is doubt, where there are problems to be overcome, the dedicated and talented minds of this city will be hard at it, experimenting, travelling, writing, chewing their pencils, tapping their clipboards, meeting, greeting and working. Always working. This week, Cherwell has done research of its own, into a selection of the potentially world-changing research going on in Oxford at the moment.
Flight Mechanics
Oxford’s Innovations Dr Graham Taylor’s research team in the Department of Zoology works to uncover the secrets that underpin the exceptional flight performance of birds and insects. Funded by a €1.95M grant from the European Research Council, the team studies questions ranging from how the sensory physiology of a hawkmoth is tuned to its flight dynamics, to how the flexible feathers of an eagle’s wings allow it to tolerate gusty conditions. The experiments push hard at the frontiers of technological possibility and almost all of the team’s apparatus is custom-designed and built, including an immersive virtual reality flight simulator for hawkmoths and an inertial sensor unit and video camera carried by the group’s trained Steppe Eagle Cossack (pictured). The team comprises Engineers and Biologists, and the work has obvious applications to the design of miniature air vehicles. Nevertheless, it is the deeper biological questions that Dr Taylor says drive his research: most fundamentally, how natural selection tunes the dynamics of a system as complex as a bird or insect in flight. Answering this question will have implications not only for our understanding of animal flight, but for our understanding of the evolutionary process itself. For funded DPhil opportunities in 2010 contact [email protected].
Photo: Simon Walker
Ultrasound
The Biomedical Ultrasonics and Biotherapy Laboratory (BUBL) has been working
to develop drug delivery systems that combine therapeutic ultrasound with microbubble technologies, for applications such as thrombolysis, reversible
opening of the blood brain barrier, and gene therapy for cardiovascular disorders. BUBL’s research focuses on whether ultrasound-induced cavitation can be used to remove the physiological barriers presented by tumour vasculature in order to enhance the therapeutic effect of otherwise potent anticancer agents throughout the tumour. The use of focussed ultrasound allows the tumour microenvironment to be disturbed in a controlled manner in order to promote the delivery of anticancer agents whilst leaving surrounding healthy tissues unaffected. To benefit from the full therapeutic potential of the proposed drug delivery system, cavitation activity must be controlled, enhanced and optimized at the site of interest. This can be accomplished by monitoring the broadband noise, harmonic and subharmonic emissions from various types of volumetric and shape oscillations that arise as a result of different cavitational behaviours. Non-invasive, passive and active monitoring of these emissions is viewed as a way of correlating particular types of cavitational activity with particular enhancements in drug activity and uptake. Ultrasound itself can also be used as a trigger for localized drug release.
Rice Growth
The problem: by 2050, global population is expected to reach 10 billion, while resources, climate change and water availability will all become increasingly unpredictable. 700 million people in Asia currently rely on rice for the majority of their calorific intake, and this is expected to increase by 50% in the next 40 years. To address this, a global group of scientists are spearheading the ‘C4 Rice’ project, coordinated by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Professor Jane Langdale is leading a research group at Oxford that investigates certain genes which are thought to play a key role in the photosynthesis of plants. The project aims to adapt the anatomy of rice leaves to change the photosynthesis pathway that is used. Rice currently uses what is known as a ‘C3′ pathway, which under warm conditions is very inefficient. The project aims to adapt the pathways to make use of the ‘C4′ form of photosynthesis, which is found in plants like maize. It is thought that the genes (GLK) Professor Langdale is investigating regulate whether a plant employs C3 or C4 methods of photosynthesis, and by transferring genes from a plant such as maize, which uses the C4 method, this more efficient form of photosynthesis could be utilised by rice, greatly reducing the amount of water and fertiliser needed to grow this staple. Currently the research is in the middle of the ‘proof of concept’ stage which tests the feasibility of the project as a whole, but has potential to be taken further.
Photo: Or Hiltch
World Healthcare
The Global Health Governance Project (GHGP), a part of the Global Economic Governance Programme based at University College, has been working since 2006, investigating the global health system, and specifically trying to establish what can be done to improve the provision of healthcare to developing nations. The GHGP tackles a range of related issues, from the accountability of global health institutions to the divergence between the healthcare priorities of the developing world and the actual provisions of donors. The interdisciplinary nature of the research allows for wide collaboration; the project draws on the skills of academics from the Department of Politics and International Relations, the Department of Public Health and Primary Care and the Oxford Centre for Tropical Medicine. The research methods include semistructured interviews with government officials and NGOs, participation in global health conferences and detailed anthropological fieldwork. Dr Devi Sridhar, founding Director of the GHGP, explained, ‘We hope that the project will lead to better accountability and transparency in relations between developing countries and donors.’ The project is currently embarking on research into the increasing usage of tobacco in many poor countries, with particular emphasis on identifying barriers to the implementation of tobacco control policies. Sridhar added that in addition to the tobacco project and recently publishing a report on the global response to HIV/AIDs, the GHGP will be ‘looking closely at the emerging economies and the role they play in shaping global health’.
Chilli Molecules
How do you know how hot a chilli is without biting into it? In the world of chilli sauce production it’s a pretty important problem, and scientists in Oxford’s Theoretical and Physical Chemistry Labs have developed a product that solves it. It seems an odd thing for Oxford researchers to be working on. However, the chilli molecule happened to be the perfect shape for the chemists to demonstrate a new nano-technology. This is part of “bottom-up science”, where University researchers focus on breakthroughs in the fundamental science and occasionally stumble upon something with a possible
real-world application. Supermarkets buy tons of chillies and pulp them to make sauce. They usually employ a panel of expert tasters to judge their hotness on the ‘Scoville scale’, from Tabasco Pepper Sauce strength (about 2,500 units) to incredibly strong sauces like Mad Dog’s Revenge (1m units – about twice the strength of pepper spray). However, this is unreliable and time-consuming. Over the last 2 years, the Oxford scientists have built and patented a handheld device using carbon nanotubes which gives an instant Scoville measurement. “You just dunk the sensor in and get a reading,” explained Prof. Compton, one of the researchers. Their next project is a garlic sensor.
Photo: Neil Rees
