Imperial News

Tate Group at the Imperial Festival: Beating Cancer Sooner

by Jennie Hutton

Members of the Tate group gave lab tours and demonstrations to members of the public during the Imperial Festival on 6th and 7th May 2017.

Anna, Monica, Chiara, Andrea, Tom, Jasmine and Remi opened up the lab to showcase the work in the group aimed at understanding cancer though studies of modified proteins. Over the two days they ran eight tours involving over eighty visitors as part of the Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre's activity at the festival

Tours began with a short talk to introduce protein modification and demonstrated with a model cell how it is possible to ‘fish out’ only modified proteins from the complex environment of the body. In the lab the visitors had hands on experience with protein separation loading polyacrylamide gels and viewing the images made from labelling different protein modifications. Finally, the visitors were able to see live cultures of cancer cells from different cell lines under the microscope.