Monthly Members’ Night - second Wednesday of each month except January.

Tonight - A presentation, followed by informal chat over tea or coffee. Telescope viewing possible afterwards depending on weather and availability of scope operators.

Tonight’s Talk

BIOCHEMISTRY

Speaker: Charlie Cooper (from Hamilton Astronomical Society)

Tonight, Charlie Cooper will be taking a break from talking about rockets and will be delving into biochemistry, drawing on his background in biomedical science, pharmacology and toxicology to explore one of the most fundamental components of life: proteins.

The talk will look at what proteins are, how chains of amino acids fold into extraordinarily complex three-dimensional structures, and why those structures are so central to almost every biological process. The talk will explore enzymes, receptors, structural proteins and signalling molecules, along with what happens when protein folding goes wrong.

From there, the talk will move into the rapidly developing world of modern protein science: proteomics, peptide and protein synthesis, protein engineering, and the remarkable advances in computational structure prediction led by systems such as AlphaFold. We’ll also consider how these technologies are beginning to let scientists not only understand proteins, but increasingly design entirely new ones.

Although this will not be a talk about astronomy per se, it is sure to be a science topic that astronomy enthusiasts and those with an interest in astrobiology will find fascinating.