Insider Imprint ISSUE 5 is here!

Insider Imprint has turned 5! Our fifth issue is jam packed with top-quality student insights, research, commentaries and reflections.

We would like to congratulate all of our issue 5 authors; well done for getting your work published, and for this achievement during a turbulent year.

View the pdf of the full issue HERE

Or scroll down to browse the brilliant content of issue 5 one section at a time.

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Welcome to Issue 5

We are very excited to be marking Insider Imprint’s 5th anniversary with this wonderful issue full of high-quality content. Inside you will find a great variety of articles including on the environment and climate change, research at Liverpool, a range of scientific commentaries as well as reflections on experiences, careers advice, wellbeing tips, artwork and even a short story.

We would like to congratulate all of our issue 5 authors for possibly your first publication; an excellent achievement you can be proud of. We would also like to acknowledge and welcome back a few authors who have published with us before! Good to have you back!

In issue 5 we have included a special feature section on the environment and climate change. This section includes two interviews with researchers at Liverpool, in which you will discover how climate change affects disease prediction and what is being done at Liverpool to make our research labs more sustainable. This section then focuses on the issue of plastic pollution in our oceans, and how biotechnology can be harnessed to break plastic down. We hope you will find this section informative, widening your appreciation of how climate change impacts us, and raising your awareness of sustainability in research.

At Insider Imprint our core aim is to provide undergraduate and master students the opportunity to disseminate their work and build confidence and skills in scientific writing and the publication process. Publishing open access online, as well as in print, creates a platform for students to showcase their activities and successes for all the world to see; this is great for employability and also provides inspiration and food for thought for other students. Our Insider Imprint editors, all PhD students at Liverpool, guide authors through our publication roadmap providing support and encouragement along the way. You can learn more about publishing with us in our ‘Insider Imprint – Your Guide’ pages within this issue!

Insider Imprint also offers students the opportunity to join our team as student ambassadors. Our ambassadors get to be involved in all the behind the scenes running of a scientific journal, joining our team meetings and getting involved in our outreach activities and content production. We would like to congratulate our three ambassadors this year who have now gained HEAR accreditation for their work with us. Many thanks for your hard work on issue 5, we hope you have gained valuable experience and skills with us whilst also having an enjoyable time.

We very much hope you enjoy reading issue 5, gaining new knowledge and inspiration. Best wishes.

Fabia and your Insider Imprint Team

YOUR GUIDE TO INSIDER IMPRINT

If you are an undergraduate or masters student in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, you can write for us. Read our special guide to publishing with us to find out more.

INSIDER IMPRINT NEWS

Read about our PODCAST and how you can join our new student ambassador team - this is a HEAR accredited activity.

Plastic is a global menace

Do we have enough data?

Yazhini Sivaram, Dr. R. Venkatesan and Mukesh Doble

Plastic is a menace to the environment. It affects the ecosystems leading to loss of biodiversity and this indirectly affects human lives. Many studies have been done to try and understand their dynamics, but is this really enough? This study is about trying to estimate marine plastic debris locally in a city in India and was done through researching other related articles to investigate plastic debris growth rate in five years.

The Invisible Plastic Pollution

How washing your clothes is destroying the environment

Gemma Bell

Plastic is a low-cost versatile material that is used in every part of life, from vital medical supplies to textiles and packaging. Over 400,000,000 tonnes of plastic are produced each year and this is predicted to double by 2040.

Biodegradation utilising enzymes offers a method to remove and prevent build-up of micro-plastics.

The Answer to Plastic Pollution

How enzymes are the future!

Aaron Rogers

Plastics are a crucial material used for decades in many industry sectors such as clothing, health care, electronics and more. Many people would be surprised to know that one of the main plastics, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), is found in clothes and when these clothes are washed small plastics known as microplastics are released.

These microplastics are smaller than 5 mm in size and are a troubling concern for the aquatic ecosystem.

Research Summary: Defining the role of fibrillin-1 in musculoskeletal ageing

Holly Giles and Dr Blandine Poulet

The UK has an ageing population, meaning an increasing proportion of the population are affected by the age-associated conditions sarcopenia, osteoporosis and osteoarthritis, impacting their morbidity, mortality and ability to live independently. These conditions have limited treatment options as the mechanisms behind the age-associated changes to the musculoskeletal system are not fully understood. One potential mechanism which is being investigated in our research group is fibrillin-1 (FBN1), which is a component of the extracellular matrix involved in the formation of elastin fibres and the regulation of TGF-β signalling.

Does Cystic Fibrosis Increase the Risk of Severe COVID-19 Infection?

Andrew Sellin and Zaina Alali

Cystic fibrosis is a condition that commonly affects the airways, whereby patients produce thick mucus that can lead to swelling and infection. It is caused by changes in a particular gene called CFTR and sufferers have an average lifespan of around 40 years. Following the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the question of whether people with cystic fibrosis are at a higher risk has been studied by the medical community since coronavirus also affects the airways.

Cetacean Brain Evolution

Jade Warren

Cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are a group of aquatic mammals consisting of baleen whales and toothed whales. While the brain size relative to body size of the earliest cetaceans was not particularly large, this significantly increased in toothed whales around 34 million years ago. The increase in relative brain size involved a considerable decrease in body size and a more modest increase in absolute brain size. Nowadays, the relative brain of cetaceans is exceptionally large; in some toothed whales this is second only to humans. A significant amount of energy is required to grow and maintain such large brains, so why have they evolved?

Can the Human Heart be Reset by Light?

An optogenetic alternative to traditional electrical cardioversion

Joseph Carr

Traditionally, patients suffering with sustained arrhythmia, i.e. atrial and ventricular fibrillation, haemodynamically unstable supraventricular tachyarrhythmia etc, undergo cardioversion to restore sinus (normal) rhythm. This generally involves defibrillation of a sedated patient with a high- energy electrical shock. Despite this, it is well documented that electrical cardioversion has low spatiotemporal resolution (i.e., cardioverts the entire heart, rather than the specific arrhythmic area), reducing its therapeutic success. It is also associated with some damaging effects, such as electroporation of cell plasma membranes. As such, multiple research groups have suggested an alternative form of cardioversion that does not require an electrical shock: optogenetics.

The Lived Experiences of Post-Operative Pain Management for Patients with Fibromyalgia

Molly Evans, Kate Cheetham and Dr Carolyn Lees

This review introduces an initial understanding of fibromyalgia and then focuses on the lived experiences of post-operative pain management for patients with fibromyalgia; this is a specific period within fibromyalgia patients’ healthcare journey that has not been identified within research. Most research on fibromyalgia is related to overall, day-to-day pain within fibromyalgia or specific pharmacological or non-pharmacological outcomes following specific surgery. This review relates to post-operative pain management when undergoing non-fibromyalgia related surgery and how various factors contribute to fibromyalgia patients’ pain. It highlights the reduced pain assessments and management pathways available specific to fibromyalgia pain and new acute surgical pain.

DNA Damage and Ageing

Premature ageing syndromes offer insight into the mechanism of ageing

Alexandra Mangham

Ageing is the time-related deterioration of an organisms biological and physiological processes. The underlying cause of ageing has been the subject of scientific research for centuries. There are two modern day theories of ageing that are supported in the literature: the programmed theory and the damage theory of ageing. To gain further insight into the causative mechanism of ageing, investigation into diseases that show early signs of ageing are beneficial in gaining understanding into the underlying mechanisms. Cockayne syndrome (CS), Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), Werner syndrome (WS) and Rothmund-Thompson syndrome (RTS) were selected because they each show aspects of premature ageing due to a defect in a pathway that repairs damaged DNA (DNA damage response (DDR)).

Gaining Experience Outside of the Life Sciences

Jonathan Timmins

My Journey to a Post-Doc in Infectious Disease Research

Rebekah Penrice-Randal

Working in the Civil Service

Kate Evans

Experiencing Bereavement at University

Katie Micklewright and Iram Zahair

Balancing Study with Other Activities

Alexandra Kettle

Congratulations to our winning author Rhiannon, writing on the subject of Inspirational Science

Accompanying Stealing Hope

Commissioned Artwork

by Jemima Western

“When I read the story, ‘Stealing Hope’ the boar mask really stood out to me. I felt that the choice of masks for each character emphasised the themes of class, sacrificing the many for the few (predator species and domesticated livestock), and obviously choice and deception. The boar mask and accompanying themes, also brought to mind William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, as it explores many similar themes, such as the desperation of survival and how this creates intense divides in societies. But also that for so long our use of antibiotics has been with the attitude of an island of unsupervised and ignorant children playing ruler over nature. Hence I was keen to draw inspiration from Paul Hogarth’s cover illustration of the 1958 copy of the book…..”