Distinguished members of the University of Cambridge have been named in the 2017 New Year Honours list, announced today. Professor Ottoline Leyser, Professor Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor John Pyle are among those who have been recognised for their contributions to society.

A new super-resolution imaging technique allows researchers to track how surface changes in proteins are related to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Researchers have developed a new method for making effective calculations in “high-dimensional space” – and proved its worth by using it to solve a 93-dimensional problem.

Postgraduate students at Cambridge walk in the footsteps of giants – Francis Crick, Elizabeth Blackburn, Stephen Hawking, Iris Murdoch and Eric Hobsbawm all pursued PhD research at the University.

Scientists have long suspected that the way materials behave on the nanoscale – that is when particles have dimensions of about 1–100 nanometres – is different from how they behave on any other scale. A new paper in the journal Chemical Science provides concrete proof that this is the case. 

It's over a hundred years since the first case of Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed. Since then we’ve learned a great deal about the protein ‘tangles’ and ‘plaques’ that cause the disease. How close are we to having effective treatments – and could we even prevent dementia from occurring in the first place?

An algorithm which models how proteins inside cells interact with each other will enhance the study of biology, and sheds light on how proteins work together to complete tasks such as turning food into energy.

Researchers have identified how alpha-synuclein, the protein associated with Parkinson’s Disease, enables communication between neurons in the brain, offering important clues about what may be happening to patients when the protein malfunctions.

Researchers have identified the role that a four-stranded version of DNA may play in the role of cancer progression, and suggest that it may be used to develop new targeted cancer therapies.

Specific mutations in the protein associated with Parkinson’s Disease, in which just one of its 140 building blocks is altered, can make a dramatic difference to processes which may lead to the condition’s onset, researchers have found.