News

Romina Plitman, Graduate student was awarded the best oral presentation  at the 2016 CMBBE conference in Tel Aviv.  http://cmbbe2016.com/program/awards.html

Congratulations to the 40 awardees of the prestigious Loke New Investigator Travel Grants at the recent IFPA meeting in Portland, Oregon. Awardees came from 16 different countries, a testimony to the depth of new talent in the field of placental biology. We wish them every success in their future careers.

Kings Fellow - Professor Ashley Moffett and Dr Francesco Colucci have jointly received and Invesigator Award from the Wellcome Trust.  Full article:  http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/news/2016/moffett-colucci-award.html

CTR members Andrew Sharkey, Ashley Moffett and Francesco Colucci were recently awarded an MRC project grant. This award will allow them to continue their research investigating how interactions between maternal uterine NK cells and fetal trophoblast cells regulate placental development. Genetic and functional studies in both humans and mouse models…

“Imagine a world without borders: animmunologist’s thoughts on Brexit” Dr Francesco Colucci  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.15252/embr.201643019/full

King,s Fellow - Professor Ashley Moffett and Dr Francesco Colucci have jointly received an Investigator Aware from the Wellcome Trust.http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/news/2016/moffett-colucci-award.html

Romina Plitman, along with other members of the CTR has recently published a paper on Three-dimensional modeling of human placental terminal villi.  Placental transport is the main factor affecting the health and development of the fetus. Due to the placenta's geometrical and mathematical complexity, the structure-function relations of placental te…

Peter et al's paper The pluripotency factor Nanog regulates pericentromeric heterochromatin organization in mouse embryonic stem cells was recently published in Genes and Development. This research, led by the Babraham Institute with collaborators in the UK, Canada and Japan, has revealed a new understanding of how an open genome structure supports…

Parallel single-cell sequencing links transcriptional and epigenetic heterogeneityWolf Reik et al report scM&T-seq, a method for parallel single-cell genome-wide methylome and transcriptome sequencing that allows for the discovery of associations between transcriptional and epigenetic variation. Profiling of 61 mouse embryonic stem cells confirmed …

Risk of preeclampsia in humans results from a failure of apes to evolve an epitheliochorial placentaIn this speculative paper, CTR Fellow Mick Elliot considers the relationship between oxidative stress and the evolution of placentation in eutherian mammals. He argues that epitheliochorial placentation, in which fetal tissues remain separated from m…

Kathy has begun to apply the technique for editing the genome that Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna developed, called CRISPR, to study the effects of genes in human development. Well done Kathy!

Iva Filipovic was awarded funding for the 5th flowcytometryUK meeting taking place in Leeds in July 2016. The funding covers both registration and accommodation and this funding was limited to a maximum of three applicants from UK. Dr Leonore Herzenberg, who developed the Fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) technique with her husband Leonard…

Jorge Lopez-Tello, from the Sferruzzi-Perri lab, recently won an Imanova Best Speaker Prize at the PDN Symposium in April 2016. It was a very closely-run competition with the prize awarded for best presentation. Well done Jorge! 

"Given the risk of complications for both mother and child from gestational diabetes, our findings suggest that screening women earlier on in pregnancy may help improve the short and long term outcomes for these women" Dr Ulla Sovio, Cambridge UniversityThe babies of obese women who develop gestational diabetes are five times as likely to be excess…

CTR member Ulla Sovio talks and presents a poster at SMFM16 and publishes a paper in Placenta: The relationship between human placental morphometry and ultrasonic measurements of utero-placental blood flow and fetal growth. Salavati N1, Sovio U2, Mayo RP3, Charnock-Jones DS4, Smith GC5