There is now a significant and increasing body of evidence that night time chemistry, driven primarily by the nitrate radical NO3, plays a significant role in governing the composition of the troposphere. Recent findings show that very high concentrations of NO3 are present away from the Earth's surface. In polluted environments, the main sinks are abundant but this is also where its formation may be most rapid and hence the NO3 turnover time is very fast. The importance of this behaviour is not as yet clearly understood, yet it may have a very large impact on atmospheric chemistry and ozone formation, regional transport and transformation of oxidised nitrogen and hence acidification and eutrophication, and may also significantly add to the regional burden of ammonium nitrate particulate, which has increasing climatic importance. To understand and predict these phenomena correctly there is a need to quantify the basic chemical processes controlling NO3 and its removal from the atmosphere; the impact of NO3 chemistry on volatile organic carbon chemistry and as a pathway for radical formation and propagation; its heterogeneous chemistry and its impact on the aerosol burden and composition; its influence on ozone formation on regional and global scales and its mediation of the atmospheric lifecycle of oxidised nitrogen. A consortium project is proposed that addresses these coupled questions using a combined programme of instrument development, airborne measurement, detailed process modelling, and regional and global modelling. The principal deliverables will be: a) Enhancements to the instrumental capability of the FAAM aircraft to include measurements of NO3 and N2O5. b) Comprehensive measurements of night time radicals, their sources and sinks, and aerosol composition in the boundary layer and free troposphere in a range of conditions. d) Quantification of the key processes which control night-time chemical processes. e) Assessment of the impacts of night-time chemistry on regional scales. f) An assessment of the global impacts of night-time chemistry in the current and future atmospheres.

Biocatalytic Asymmetric Reduction Animation Using Reductive Aminases (RedAms)"

Understanding human skin appearance is a subject of great interest in science, medicine and technology. In medicine, skin appearance is a vital factor in surgical/prosthetic reconstruction, medical make-up/tattooing and disease diagnosis. The production of facial prostheses to replace missing facial structures requires the skills of highly trained anaplastologists to correctly match the shape and colour of the prosthesis to that of the host skin. With the 3D printing of human skin now available the process involved in matching natural and manufactured skin samples has become essential; a robust, accurate and efficient imaging system is required that acquires the relevant skin information and predicts a good match and translates this information through this new and innovative manufacturing process. A major problem with manufactured skin is that the match to the individual's natural skin must hold not only be accurate under a particular ambient illumination but the match needs to be preserved when the individual is moving between different environments, e.g. when the individual moves from office or LED lighting into daylight. To achieve this illumination invariance, the physical properties of the skin need to be taken into account. A further requirement for successful skin reproduction is the development of appearance models. These can be considered as individual "recipes' or 'blueprints" for each skin type and these not only represent inter-personal differences - different ethnic groups and age ranges, but also intra-personal differences - for each individual. Features of the human skin (wrinkles, pores, freckles, spots etc) make human skin as individual as a finger prints and thus, for facial prosthetics applications, skin appearance models also need to be fine-tuned for each individual area. The purpose of this work is to develop a complete spectral-based 3D imaging system which will allow us to additively manufacture soft tissue prosthetics or deliver predictable tattooing techniques that will exactly match the skin colour of a particular individual (Application 1) or have the capability to rapidly manufacture/3D print soft tissue replacements representative of a particular ethnic/age/gender group with a high degree of accuracy (Application 2). In application 1, the input to this 3D imaging system will consist of a 3D colour skin image (of a particular individual) obtained with a 3D camera in conjunction other specific skin characteristics. The skin sample will then be printed using a printer profile that maximises the match between the natural and printed skin across different ambient illuminations. In application 2, the skin manufacturing process will not be fine-tuned for a particular individual, but input to the 3D imaging system will consist of basic information about the age, gender and ethnicity. Representative skin samples (colour; texture; translucency; geometry) for this group will then be loaded from a pre-computed library instead of using the measurements from an individual.

It is estimated that more than one in three of us will develop cancer in our lifetime, and for one in four it will be the cause of death. Scientists play an important role in combating this illness. Worldwide activities range from basic research into understanding the causes of cancer to the subject of this proposal, which is the development of new anticancer treatments.This research is concerned with the study of new drugs that have metal atoms as important constituents (metallodrugs), and which only become toxic to cancer cells upon irradiation of light (photoactivation). The combination of light-sensitive drugs and lasers as light sources means that the site of treatment can be carefully controlled, minimising side effects and avoiding killing healthy cells. To optimise the treatment, this research will also develop new ways to irradiate cancer cells using modern lasers with optical fibre delivery, thereby allowing any part of the body to be irradiated. In addition, new ways to deliver the drugs to the cancer cells will be studied. The drug-delivery method that will be investigated is the use of liposomes, which act as microscopic spherical containers. These can be used to store large amounts of the metallodrug and to preferentially bind to cancer cells by modifying the surface of the liposome. It may even be possible to burst open and release the drugs upon demand by activating light-sensitive molecules in the liposome.Modern science invariably requires increasingly sophisticated instrumentation and technology, and cancer research is no exception. The research described in this proposal is reliant on state of the art laser systems and advanced microscopes, which are available at the specialist COSMIC centre within the University of Edinburgh. This research will also involve close collaboration with biologists and clinicians, and the longer-term view would be for these photoactivated metallodrugs and liposome delivery systems to be in clinical trials in the next 5-10 years. In this respect, this area of research is well positioned to benefit from the rapidly expanding UK biotechnology sector, thereby maximising the potential for exploitation.

This project concerns an extension of Galois theory to rings rather than fields.We propose to develop computational techniques, both for their own sake and in order to spot the pattern that leads to new theorems.We also want to develop new and sophisticated techniques based on algebraic geometry.