University of Otago, Department of Chemistry

Plant & Food Research Dunedin news

Not direct research news unfortunately, but a big change for us and other chemists in the Crown Research Institutes around Aotearoa New Zealand.

Most of you probably heard the plan to merge these CRIs into new bodies. The latest is that Plant & Food Research, AgResearch, Scion, Manaaki Whenua Landcare and a major part of Callaghan Science will become the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science, with 1 July to be day one of this amalgamated/consolidated group. We will be charged with “advancing innovation in agriculture, aquaculture, forestry, biotechnology and manufacturing; protecting ecosystems from biosecurity threats and climate risks; and developing new bio-based technologies and products”. Our current CEO Mark Piper (working hard - like all the other senior CRI managers - to put himself out of his current job) assures us this does cover food and horticulture.

NIWA and GNS and their chemists go into the New Zealand Institute for Earth Science, and ESR into the New Zealand Institute for Public Health and Forensic Science.

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Gordon Group

Welcome to Skyler Morison, Lisa Leung and Daniel MacKenzie. Lisa and Daniel are working in Forensics Sciences as Honours students.  Lisa is measuring the changes in pig hair after death. Daniel is measuring the changes of pig bone after death.

Yasmin is leaving as her year studying with us is over. Her work on characterising the lipid and protein components of locusts (a collaboration with Food Science Otago) has been great; she will be dearly missed. ☹

*Trigger warning: a picture of Lisa’s decomposing pig following:

Congratulations to Skyler, our talented 390 student, for winning the “Decorate Your Desser-tation 2025” competition! Their creative and delicious dessert truly showcased their artistic skills.

Huge congratulations to Samuel Harris for submitting his PhD thesis and ringing the bell! 🎉

New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) has upgraded their high-performance computing systems. We have been granted access to support our ongoing computational work. Peter is enjoying these for his solid-state calculations with CRYSTAL23. More chips please! 

Here’s a fun caricature by Skyler Morison:

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The low-frequency 532 nm Raman setup is back up and running in Keith Gordon’s lab! 🥳 The dark room just got a whole lot brighter – thanks to the green laser light! 😁 We are wearing goggles at high power.

To celebrate the Muslim Eid, Khansa prepared a variety of homemade cookies and desserts, sharing the festive spirit with the research group.

Wu Group

The 35th Anniversary World Congress on Biosensors (Biosensors 2025) Conference was recently held in Lisbon, Portugal. Yanfang Wu gave a talk at it. He talked about his work on nanopore blockade sensors for quantifying proteins in complex biological samples from electrical to optical measurements. Yanfang gave an overview about new strategies for single molecule nanopore sensing as analytical tools and how that might help enable early disease diagnosis.

There was also a nice catch up with our Australian research colleagues including Professor Justin Gooding, and his former and current group members.