Antibiotic resistance poses one of the biggest threats to medicine in the 21^st century. In this blog post, Boudewijn Dominicus explores the exciting new strategies scientists are developing to combat this threat, ranging from new antibiotic classes to bacterial decoys.

In a class of its own

Scientists at Northeastern University recently announced the discovery of teixobactin, a compound that represents a new class of antibiotics¹. Teixobactin has a unique mechanism of action: it works by binding to two types of fat molecule some bacteria use to build their cell walls. Cutting off their supply means the cell walls cannot be maintained and eventually fall apart. This mechanism has the added advantage of making it very difficult for bacteria to develop resistance against it. The majority of antibiotics target proteins, which can be readily altered by mutation without severe consequences. By contrast, changing both types of fat molecules to evade antibiotic action would require a fundamental change in how bacteria construct their cell walls, not an easy step. As such, the team behind teixobactin believe it will take as much as 30 years before bacteria develop resistance to this class of antibiotic.

What made the discovery of teixobactin even more noteworthy was how it was discovered. As mentioned in the previous blogpost, many bacteria produce their own antibacterial compounds to keep competing species at bay. Screening these (often soil-based) bacteria for potential new antibiotics would be a potent source of new antibacterial therapies; however until now 99% of these bacteria couldn’t be grown and tested in the lab. The scientists solved this by developing a new screening device known as the iChip, which allows bacteria to be cultivated in their natural habitat. Bacteria are introduced between two permeable sheets inside the device, which is then put back into the nutrient-rich soil, allowing the bacteria to grow into larger colonies which can then be screened for antibiotic activity.

The iChip represents a great new tool in the search for novel antibiotic therapies. Source: Slava Epstein

Just a passing phage…

Another exciting strategy is to turn a resistant bacterium’s immune system against itself, an idea developed by a team of scientists at MIT². Bacteria have an immune system, known as CRISPR, which protects them from bacteriophage (a type of virus that infects bacteria). One component of this system is a protein known as Cas9, which can recognise and ‘digest’ certain foreign DNA sequences. Cas9 is guided by targeting molecules which are specific to these sequences.

By modifying these targeting molecules to recognise DNA sequences corresponding to resistance, scientists were able to make the CRISPR system exclusively digest the bacteria’s own antibiotic resistance genes, thereby killing them. The modified targeting molecules were smuggled into the bacterium, ironically, by a bacteriophage which acts like a sort of living syringe – injecting them into the bacterial cell. What makes this treatment even better is that it is specific; non-resistant beneficial bacteria are left alone.

Targeting molecules are packaged into bacteriophage which injects them into the bacterium. These molecules then guide CRISPR to digest DNA containing antibiotic resistance genes (including DNA found on plasmids – a DNA structure some bacteria use to exchange genes with each other) Source: BBC News

Tackling toxins

Ultimately one of our best defences against bacteria is our own body’s immune response. What if we could minimise the damage done by the toxins produced by bacteria, while leaving the immune system to fight the infection? This is the philosophy followed by a team at the University of Bern who have developed ‘decoy targets’ for bacterial toxins³.

The team engineered artificial nanoparticles, known as liposomes, made from a mixture of cholesterol and a molecule called sphingomyelin. Since toxins primarily use these two molecules to target animal cells, a liposome containing high proportions of these makes a very ‘attractive’ target. With toxins diverted away from animal cells, bacteria are rendered relatively harmless. Mice, treated with liposomes within 10 hours of being infected by bacteria such as S. aureus and S. pneumonia, survived without additional antibiotic therapy (though the scientists envisage liposomes could be used in tandem with limited antibiotics). Since the bacteria themselves aren’t being targeted, this approach has the added benefit of not promoting further antibiotic resistance.

Fleming later said of his discovery: “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer.” Nearly 80 years on, scientists worldwide are still striving to keep this revolution, and us, alive.

Boudewijn Dominicus

References

¹Ling LL, Schneider T, Peoples AJ, et al. A new antibiotic kills pathogens without detectable resistance. Nature. 2015

² Citorik RJ, Mimee M, Lu TK. Sequence-specific antimicrobials using efficiently delivered RNA-guided nucleases. Nat Biotechnol. 2014;32(11):1141-5.

³Henry BD, Neill DR, Becker KA, et al. Engineered liposomes sequester bacterial exotoxins and protect from severe invasive infections in mice. Nat Biotechnol. 2015;33(1):81-8.

On the 60^th anniversary of Alexander Fleming’s death, in a two-part blog Boudewijn Dominicus investigates Fleming's prescient predictions about antibiotic resistance and what scientists are doing today to overcome it.

You’d think that an untidy desk is hardly the best place to start when trying to make a revolutionary medical discovery. But it was exactly that which led to Alexander Fleming, who died 60 years ago today, to discover penicillin¹. On the morning of 28 September 1928, having returned from his summer holiday, Fleming was clearing away a mess of plates left out on his desk when he noticed a Petri dish contaminated by a blue-green mould (later found to be Pencillium notatum). This mould demonstrated a halo of antibacterial activity around it, destroying all the Staphylococcus bacterial colonies in its vicinity. 

 

Fleming’s original lab notes can be seen right here at the British Library in the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery. Source: The British Library

He isolated the mould’s active component, named it penicillin, and over the following few years investigated its remarkable potency and potential. By 1944 penicillin was ready for mass production, in large part due to the invaluable work carried out by Florey and Chain in isolating and purifying it², heralding the start of the antibiotic revolution. Unfortunately it seems that this revolution may be coming to an end, as antibiotic resistance renders traditional antibiotics increasingly ineffective.

For someone whose laboratory and written work was so chaotic (researchers at the British Library have spent hours trying to make sense of his scrawled and scrambled notebooks), some of Fleming’s conclusions were remarkably forward-thinking. By the time industrial-scale antibiotic production became a reality, Fleming was already warning of the risks of antibiotic resistance. Indeed, in 1945 he gave a speech to the American Association of Penicillin Producers³ where he warned that misuse of penicillin would result in bacteria that "are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms [will be] bred out which can be passed on to other individuals and perhaps from them to others until they reach someone who gets septicemia [infection in the blood stream] or a pneumonia which penicillin cannot save". So how exactly are bacteria ‘educated to resist’ antibiotics?

The Rise of Resistance

Antibiotic resistance is actually a naturally occurring phenomenon, which arises through random mutations in bacterial DNA, allowing bacteria to in some way circumnavigate an antibiotic’s normal mechanism of action. Resistance mutations can take many forms: some block the route by which antibiotics enter the bacteria, while others produce pumping mechanisms that eject the antibiotic. Some eliminate or change the antibiotic’s target; others enable the bacteria to ‘digest’ the antibiotic.

Such mutations can still confer a small advantage in the absence of manmade antibiotics – some bacteria produce antibacterial compounds to kill off competing species, and resistance genes allow these competing species to survive such an antibiotic attack. However, in nature this occurs on such a small scale that it doesn’t make the characteristic commonplace. Unfortunately, large-scale and indiscriminate human antibiotic usage has made this characteristic far more advantageous, making resistant strains significantly more prevalent than before.

Source: Centre for Disease Control, “Antibiotic Resistance in the United States”, 2013

Herein lies one of the most important solutions to antibiotic resistance: reduce our excessive antibiotic usage and you reduce the selective pressure in favour of resistant strains.

This means cutting down on a culture of needless prescription. Viral infections like colds cannot be treated with antibiotics; a practice Fleming described as “a waste of [a doctor’s] time, a patient’s time and a waste of penicillin”. When antibiotics are required, we should use them in a targeted manner based on precise infection diagnoses, as promoted by the 2014 Longitude Prize. We also need to limit industrial scale usage in farming with up to 50% of antibiotics given to livestock, primarily to compensate for the crowded conditions commonly found in factory farms.

The ever-prescient Fleming took a hard line against abuses of his newly discovered medicine, writing in the New York Times in 1945⁴ that “the thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is responsible for the death of the man who eventually succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted.” Careful stewardship of antibiotic usage may just give scientists enough time to find new ways of 'averting the evil' of antibiotic resistance. Check out our next blog to find exactly how scientists across the globe are doing just that.

Boudewijn Dominicus

References

¹ Fleming A. On the antibacterial action of cultures of a penicillium, with special reference to their use in the isolation of B. influenzae. 1929. Bull World Health Organ. 2001;79(8):780-90.

² Chain E, Florey HW, Adelaide MB, et al. Penicillin as a chemotherapeutic agent. 1940. Clin Orthop Relat Res. 1993;(295):3-7.

³ Fleming A. Speech by A. Fleming at a banquet in his honour at the Waldorf Astoria, New York, 25 June, 1945. American Association of Penicillin Producers. Typewritten. British Library Add. MS 56122, ff. 232-242

 ⁴Penicillin’s finder assays its future. New York Times. 1945 June 26;:21

We are excited to announce voting has now opened for Access to Understanding’s People’s Choice Award!

The People’s Choice Award is an important part of the competition – since the entries are written for the public, we think they should be judged by the public. Click here or on the image below to read and vote for one of the 12 shortlisted entries.

 

You can vote for as many articles as you like, once a day. Voting will close at 1200 GMT on 27 March 2015, and the winner will be revealed at the Access to Understanding awards ceremony that evening.

Happy reading!

Boudewijn Dominicus

Katie Howe introduces our upcoming TalkScience@BL event: “Science in extreme environments: where research meets exploration?”. More information and tickets are available here.

Scientists travel to the tops of mountains, the polar regions and even outer space in order to conduct experiments, make observations and set up instruments. But what have we learned from doing science in extreme environments? Studies of creatures that survive in extreme environments allow scientists to investigate the limits of life. From tube worms that live near hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor¹ to desert ants in the scorching Sahara desert²,  these so-called extremophiles have adapted to thrive in harsh conditions such as extreme heat, salt or acid. Studying these masters of adaptation has a host of human benefits. For example, scientists are now investigating the potential of biological antifreeze molecules found in the internal fluids of Alaskan beetles for use in cryopreservation and agriculture³. In addition, extremophiles can help us understand how life on Earth began and how life might survive beyond the Earth. As well as providing important locations for studies of biodiversity and adaptation, extreme environments are also useful for many other types of scientific enquiry. For example the poles are a useful vantage point for atmospheric and astronomical observations, while experiments in space help us understand gravity and its effect on human health. The effect of microgravity on osteoporosis⁴ has received particular attention. In addition, technologies developed for use on extreme expeditions can have wider commercial applications. Space exploration alone has generated hundreds of technology ‘spin-offs’ including the now widespread memory-foam, which was originally developed by NASA to protect pilots in the event of a crash⁵.

But projects such as these come with a hefty price tag. Opponents argue that this money could be better spent on causes that are more directly relevant to human health or well being. There is also the potential human cost. By their very nature these extreme environments push humans, and their equipment, to their limits. In 2013 the crew of the ice breaker ship Akademik Shokalskiy⁶ became trapped in thick ice while operating a scientific expedition in Antarctica. They were rescued after two weeks - unharmed, but following a dangerous and expensive rescue mission. Others warn of the environmental impacts as previously unspoilt areas are now being colonised by scientific researchers.

Another important issue is that exploring these places could make science a vehicle through which geopolitics is played out. Historically, exploration of extreme environments has been strongly associated with geopolitics - from the Cold War space race to the search for the North West passage - and this still persists today. As one of the Earth's final frontiers, Antarctica could be seen as a place to assert national political interests. Over fifty nations have agreed to the Antarctic Treaty and many of these have field stations at the pole. However many countries (notably those in Africa and the Middle East) still lack access to the region.

Aside from the more direct benefits to human wellbeing, there are many less tangible reasons to explore these environments. Although scientists are often required to justify their work by predicting the potential benefits, is there an argument that we simply need to explore for the sake of curiosity? To quote Donald Rumsfeld; “We don’t know what we don’t know.” When Captain Cook caught the first glimpse of Antarctica in 1775 he was not impressed and dismissed the perilous icy wasteland as being of no use to man. In his journal Cook said of whomever should proceed further than he had done; "I shall not envy him the honour of discovery, but I will be bold to say that the world will not be benefited by it." Fast forward 240 years and Antarctica is now a useful site for a huge range of scientific endeavours⁷. 

Join us on 25^th March to discuss why scientists are driven to explore extreme environments. The debate will be chaired by Alok Jha and speakers include Professor Jane Francis, Dr Michael Bravo and Dr Kevin Fong. Tickets are available here.

Katie Howe

[1] http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3122624

[2] http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/11907048

[3] http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/19403530 

[4] http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC4119729 

[5] http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2005/ch_6.html

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Shokalskiy

[7] http://www.nature.com/news/polar-research-six-priorities-for-antarctic-science-1.15658

The Knowledge Quarter, with the British Library as its nucleus, is the name given to a London hotspot of technology, knowledge, art and science organisations and - this should be the exciting bit - of interdisciplinary and interpersonal collaboration, and of pulling together resources in new ways. But when George Osborne launched the Knowledge Quarter in December 2014 he was perhaps running to catch up with what has long been hatching here. Laurence Scales looks at three examples from the last 125 years of scientists in the area crossing boundaries.

Big Data

You may have thought that statisticians never bothered in practice with all that coin tossing. Not true! Karl Pearson (1857-1936) ‘occupied part of the vacation of 1892 with 2400 tosses of ten shillings at a time’.

In the wake of Darwin the mechanism and rules of biological inheritance remained obscure and an effort was launched by the Royal Society to probe the subject by conducting statistical inquiries into the measurable characteristics of plants and animals. To this end Pearson established a biometric laboratory at University College London. Unfortunately, in Pearson’s case the quest for understanding nature also became entwined with his Victorian prejudices and he veered off into eugenics. However, in his statistical work he looked for patterns in raw data, investigated covariance (correlation) and revived interest in Bayes’ rule (trying to work backwards from measured probabilities to select between hypotheses).

Karl Pearson | Wellcome Images (CC-BY)

Pearson recruited skilled human computers armed with mechanical calculators and, when war broke out in 1914, he was able to redeploy them outside biology, providing the government with graphs concerning shipping and imports on which the war effort depended. His team also took on aeronautical and ballistic calculations. Solving these problems required not just brute force but simplification and efficiency.

Pearson had thus developed some of the basic tools of data mining or ‘big data’ analysis, the projected domain of the Alan Turing Institute which has a place reserved in the Knowledge Quarter. The Francis Crick Institute behind the British Library will, no doubt, be using such algorithms to mine data from medical records.

Knowledge and Collaboration

About a kilometre north west from the British Library is the last home of molecular biologist J. D. Bernal (1901-1971). In 1943 Bernal worked for Combined Operations Headquarters, a collaboration of army, navy and air force then focused on planning the 1944 invasion that liberated Europe. This may just sound like an exercise in military might but preparations also necessitated the use of every possible source of information.

A lesson from that campaign is that collaboration is not always the automatic and harmonious outcome of proximity. Chief of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, knew that he had not only to shake his headquarters service chiefs out of their grooves but also inject new knowledge and imagination to solve military problems. Bernal was one of those he recruited for the purpose. Habitual secrecy also had to go: Bernal could not provide a good answer until he was sure he was being asked the right question.

Normandy Supply | Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Bernal possessed extraordinary knowledge and intellect, not limited to molecular biology. (But he once remarked, when pressed, that he knew nothing at all about the fourth century in Romania.) He set about investigating, without having access to the Normandy beaches, the physics of waves and sand and the shoreline geology of the area. An important source was the British Museum (the British Library’s former home). He began by consulting a pre-war guide book. Eventually, his desk was even strewn with reports in Latin. The Romans used certain areas of Normandy as a source of peat for fuel, and peat meant peat bogs, unsuitable ground for assault vehicles. The invasion plans of 1944 reflected this accordingly and were largely successful – something else you might not have known that the Romans did for us.

Art and Science

In 2013 visitors to the London Canal Museum, a few blocks north east of the British Library, were invited to don a hard hat to descend into the dank Victorian ice wells. For a few weeks the caverns which once stored Norwegian ice to preserve London’s fish and freeze its ice cream were home to Covariance, a sparkling art installation inspired by subterranean particle detectors and sponsored by the Institute of Physics. (Both organisations are near neighbours and now KQ partners).

"Covariance" Tim Lewis | London Canal Museum

Covariance was a way for both parties to engage with new audiences and the museum also used IT to make the artwork accessible for those unable to visit or scale a ladder. We don’t yet know whether any new ways of processing particle data have emerged from looking at the artist Lyndall Phelps’ glistening ‘diamantes’. While the ice wells may well have turned some young minds towards ice cream, it might just also have turned a few in new directions.

Laurence Scales, www.laurenceswalks.co.uk , @LWalksLondon

Laurence leads unique and eclectic London tours focused on the history of discovery, invention and intelligence, most recently one devoted to Geeky Ladies.  He is a graduate in engineering and has worked in various technological industries.

Further reading

J. D. Bernal, The Sage of Science by Andrew Brown, 2005

When Computers Were Human by David Alan Grier,2005

The Theory That Would not Die by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, 2011

The Watery Maze: The Story of Combined Operations by Bernard Fergusson, 1961

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, On-Line Edition

In June last year, we held a DataCite workshop hosted by the University of Glasgow. We've now turned our speaker's use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for rainforest data into a video and printed case study.

You can still find a short summary of that event here. Our thanks go to Gabriela Lopez-Gonzalez for taking the time to come and film with us.

 

We hope that this case study will help institutions promote the idea of data citation and use of DOIs for data to their researchers, and that this in turn will encourage more submission of data to institutional repositories.

 

A DataCite DOI is not just for data

During January we had also been trying to spread the word that DOIs from DataCite aren't necessarily just for data. We've been working with the British Library's EThOS service to look at how UK institutions might give DOIs to their electronic theses and dissertations.

There was an initial workshop to divine the issues in November 2014, and on 16^th January we held a bigger workshop, bringing more institutions together to look at how we might start to establish a common way of identifying e-theses in the UK.

The technical step of assigning a DOI to a thesis is relatively straightforward. Once an institution is working with DataCite (or CrossRef) they can use their established systems to assign a DOI to a thesis. But the policies surrounding the issue and management of this process are more complex. We're hoping that these workshops have helped everyone to pull in the same direction and collaborate on answers to common questions.

This work has given rise to a proposal to look at how to improve the connection between a thesis and the data it is built on. By triggering the consideration of sharing the data supporting a thesis, maybe we can "get 'em young" and introduce good data sharing practice as early in the research career as possible. Connecting the thesis and its data also increases the visibility of both, helping early career researchers to reap the benefits of their hard work sooner.

Watch this space to see what happens next!

 

Related articles

#ShareMyThesis competition - now open

• Are you currently studying for or have you completed a PhD degree?
• Do you want to tell the world why your research is important?

Enter the #ShareMyThesis competition and win a 15 inch MacBook Pro.

Closing date: 9 February 2015 10.00

A PhD thesis is perhaps the largest piece of work that an academic researcher will ever write. But unfortunately these hefty tomes are often destined to be used as doorstops or else gather dust on a forgotten book shelf.

As regular readers of the blog will know we are interested in how PhD theses can be used as a source of information. The British Library recognise the huge amount of work that goes into producing a PhD thesis and we want to raise awareness of the importance of research carried out during the course of a doctorate and increase visibility of the PhD thesis as a valuable source of research information.

To that end the #ShareMyThesis competition challenges PhD students past and present to summarise why your PhD research is important in 140 characters or less. The competition is open worldwide and to entries from all subject areas – so tell your non-sciencey friends too!

To enter simply tweet why your PhD research is important using the hashtag #ShareMyThesis. Remember that your tweet should convey why your research is important (not just what your research is about). For more information and full terms and conditions see www.bl.uk/share-my-thesis

This competition is brought to you by EThOS at the British Library and partners Research Councils UK and Vitae.

Francis Owtram explores how Indian Ocean tsunami research is being enhanced by the Qatar Digital Library (QDL), a new bilingual, online portal of archival material relating to Gulf history and Arabic science. This is the first post in a series about the potential of the QDL to provide easier access to historic information for use in contemporary scientific research.

This month marks the 10^th anniversary of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami which wreaked havoc around the Indian Ocean leading to the loss of over 250,000 lives. Following this calamitous event there has been increased international effort to understand and predict sources of future tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. To do this many scientists study seismic behaviour from historic eruptions however a key challenge is gaining access to original observational data. Digitised historic material such as that found within the Qatar Digital Library is therefore a useful source of information that can assist this important research.

The 1945 Makran Tsunami

To predict future tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, significant scientific attention has focused on historic activity at the Makran subduction zone, a giant fault slanting beneath the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan and Iran.

Adapted from Musson 2009, Journal of the Geological Society, 166, 387-391.

Of particular interest is a massive quake that took place on 28 November 1945 and caused a tsunami that killed over 4000 people in the Indian sub-continent, Iran and Oman. Along with interviews of survivors, original documents can provide vital information on this historic event. 

OCR technology pulls out ‘buried information’

When Professor Din Muhammad Kakar, a geologist at the University of Balochistan in Pakistan, contacted the British Library requesting information on the 1945 earthquake, attention turned to the new Qatar Digital Library portal. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software embedded in the portal was able to pull out references to the 1945 earthquake and tsunami in reports submitted by British Political Agents posted in the area.

In one document political agent Ralph Hallows recorded that a small island was thrown up off the coast of Gwadur by ‘volcanic activity’ (left image). Dr Gemma Smith, a geophysicist at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, notes that: "Rather than a magmatic volcano, this is likely to refer to a mud volcano produced by the movement and uplift of sediment under high pressures. A similar phenomenon occurred during a recent (2013) earthquake in this region, lending increased credibility to these historical reports of islands appearing offshore".

Another report records the much greater damage inflicted by the earthquake and ensuing tsunami further along the coast at Pasna. This document records that the underwater cable link between Muscat and Karachi was damaged affecting communications (right image). Search terms such as ‘earthquake’ and ‘tidal wave’ can reveal further instances of seismic activity including an earthquake in 1911.

'Administration Reports of the Persian Gulf, 1945 [-1946]' Left: Page 196; Right: Page 192.

The value of historical data

Dr Smith explains the value of these detailed historical records: "There's quite a lot of uncertainty surrounding historical seismicity in this region, specifically regarding which fault zone any particular historical earthquake is sourced from, as there are many active plate boundaries in the surrounding area. In light of this complexity any additional historical earthquake records (especially those with good locational information) can be very helpful. Other particularly useful content would be any specific information regarding the level of damage to structures as this can assist with magnitude estimation".

Being able to predict future quakes more accurately enables assessment of potential impacts on the environment and can also inform disaster planning such as Professor Kakar’s earthquake preparedness lessons carried out in schools in Pakistan. This case study illustrates how historical data can be useful to contemporary scientists. The meticulous record keeping and detailed observations in reports held within the QDL archive, combined with the powerful OCR technology, mean that the QDL portal is a particularly rich resource for this type of work.

Dr Francis Owtram, Gulf History Project Officer

……………

Further information about the Qatar Digital Library

The Qatar Digital Library (QDL) provides access to previously undigitised British Library India Office Records archive materials relating to Gulf history as well as Arabic scientific manuscripts. The portal was launched earlier this year by the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership. Up to 500,000 images of items from the British Library’s India Office Records are now freely available online for the first time, with content ranging from archives, and maps, to sound recordings and photographs. Another key part of the QDL is the selection of Arabic manuscripts from the British Library Collections dealing with scientific subjects such as medicine, mathematics, astronomy, engineering and chemistry. The first 40 of these manuscripts were put online in October and an announcement including a list of these can be found here. There are now 50 scientific manuscripts on the portal, containing over 120 different texts.

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As 2014 draws to a close, it has been another busy year for us here at the Library running DataCite UK. Over the past 12 months the number of organisations that are now using DataCite DOIs in the UK has gone up to 26.

One highlight from earlier in the year was the minting of 3millionth DOI, which you can find here: http://doi.org/10.5517/CCPHZ37. This was minted as part of the work by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre to assign DOIs to their crystallographic datasets. This has been a particularly nice milestone to have as 2014 has been the International Year of Crystallography.

In this year of crystallography, CCDC are by no means the only crystallography database getting DOIs for their data. Both eCrystals (http://ecrystals.chem.soton.ac.uk/) based at Southampton and the SPECTRa project at Imperial (https://spectradspace.lib.imperial.ac.uk:8443/handle/10042/13) are doing the same thing.

This work now means that there are DOIs available for the crystal structure of caffeine (http://doi.org/10.5517/CCNH4QZ), paracetamol (http://doi.org/10.5517/CC4C64T) and theobromine (http://doi.org/10.5517/CC4D14P), all things that you might want to (or might need to) partake of this Christmas.

Theobromine is a key flavour compound in milk and dark chocolate, and the reason you can't feed it to your pets: theobromine is particularly toxic to animals. Image from Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jhard/11399049754 

 

 

An introduction to the Access to Understanding web resource, which provides guidance on how to write a plain English summary.

The 2015 Access to Understanding science writing competition is now open for entries. The British Library, Europe PMC and eLife are challenging early career researchers to write a plain English summary of a recent biomedical research article.

If you are thinking of entering the competition then you might be interested in taking a look at the writing guidance on the Access to Understanding website.

This resource explains what a plain English summary is and gives top tips on how you can write a great one yourself. It also covers the reasons why plain English summaries are useful and provides links to further resources where you can find inspiration and learn more.

Some excellent prizes are on offer for this year's competition - the winner will receive an iPad and their entry published in eLife. The competition closes on 9^th December so if you are looking for something to do this weekend then look no further! Find out more about the competition here.

Katie Howe

Related articles

Science writing competition - now open for entries!

Access to Understanding