THE SUSS-EX CLUB
NEWSLETTER No. 48, Summer
2019
Edited by Adrian Peasgood
In
this issue:
Forthcoming
events
Recent
programme
Obituaries
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Thursday
5 September
Harvey's Brewery Tour, 6.30 pm -
8.45 pm
We have
arranged a tour of the historic Harvey's Brewery in Lewes. This will be on Thursday 5 September starting at 6.30
pm and finishing at about 8.45 pm. We will be told about the art of
beer brewing and be shown how the famous Harvey's ales are produced. At about 8.00 pm after the formal tour has ended, we
will be given a chance to sample, at Harvey's expense, their various products
so this should provide a fitting end to the evening.
The number
of places we have for the tour is strictly limited by the brewery to a maximum
of 25 so tickets will have to be allocated on a first come first served basis. The cost will be £5 a head and the booking form with
instructions for payment is at
the end of this Newsletter. As I have had to pay for all the tickets up front,
please can you make your cheques payable to me, Colin Finn.
We should meet just before 6.30 pm in the Harvey's
Brewery yard, which is
located over the River Ouse bridge in Cliffe High Street, Lewes, opposite
Bill's Restaurant.
Parking is
easy. You can either park free in the Tesco car park or in the public car park
off Friars Walk (behind the Premier Inn).
Do come. It
will be an entertaining event.
Colin Finn
Thursday
3 October
Visit
to the West Pier Centre and the i360
We
will assemble on Thursday 3 October at the West Pier Centre (WPC) for a 5.00 pm
talk by Fred Gray on ‘Seaside Architecture and the role that Brighton has
played in its development’. WPC is located in one of the arches a few steps to
the east of the i360, postcode BN1 2FL.
Fred
is Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Community Engagement, and the author of
several books on the history of the seaside, including one on the history of the
West Pier.
After
the talk we propose to go on the 6.30 pm flight on the i360 and then, for those
up for it, over to the Regency Restaurant for a fish and chip supper. Sunset
on that date is just after 6.30 so this will be a twilight flight and a different
experience if you have only been on the i360 in the daytime.
At
this stage I would just like to know if you would like to come on the visit
and/or the restaurant (please reply to S.P.C.Pavey@sussex.ac.uk) so
that I have an idea of numbers for a group booking. If you live in BN1, BN2,
BN3 or BN41 postcodes you are eligible for the annual Resident Membership
scheme, which gives one half price admission; for details see the i360 website.
Alternatively an annual pass (unlimited flights for 12 months) is only £30. A
pre-booked group would cost around £13 each.
I
will do a further circulation at the beginning of September about the visit
with final arrangements.
Steve Pavey
Wednesday
18 December
Christmas
party
A
date for your diary – this year the joint USPAS / Suss_Ex party will be on
Wednesday 18 December. I am expecting that arrangements will be similar to
last year but I will write again with full details and a booking form once we
have everything confirmed.
Steve Pavey
RECENT PROGRAMME
Wednesday
29 May
Royal Pavilion
Gardens
The
weather smiled upon us one morning at the end of May for a first rate tour with
the Head Gardener, Robert Hill-Snook. Robert enlightened a group of about a dozen
members about the history of the gardens and the various design styles that
have been used over the decades. He explained that it was never intended to be
a flower garden (hence the emphasis on greenery) but was designed to offer
unexpected glanced vistas of the Pavilion and Dome through the trees and shrubs
and to bring a taste of the countryside into the town.
We
also learned about the practical problems caused by the sheer pressure of
numbers using the gardens, which have resulted in the gardens being marked as
‘at risk’ by Historic England.
After
the tour we took a well-deserved coffee and cake in a nearby Italian café and,
as we sat down, the heavens opened!
Steve
Pavey
OBITUARIES
Professor Robert Thomas MRSC
This obituary was originally published by the Royal Society
of Chemistry at:
https://www.rsc.org/Membership/AboutRscMembership/Obituaries/R_Thomas_Obituary.asp
1927-2018
Bob
Thomas was born in Edinburgh on 21 February 1927. He was educated at Emmanuel
Boys School, London, and then at the University of London in a Special Two-Year
Degree in Chemistry. He began his PhD studies in 1947 at the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine under the supervision of Professor Harold
Raistrick, a UK pioneer in the study of microbial metabolites. Working on
metabolites of the mould, Alternaria tenuis,
Bob isolated two new crystalline compounds and unambiguously elucidated the
structure of one of them, alternariol, showing the other to be one of two
possible monomethyl ethers of alternariol.
In
January 1952 he married Joan Barron and they set sail for Melbourne where Bob
took up an appointment as a Senior Research Officer with the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's Protein Chemistry Laboratory
and commenced a study of the degradation of cellulose by fungal enzymes. He
continued to work in this area on moving to a post at the National Research
Council, Ottawa, where he spent most of 1955.
At the
beginning of his time in Melbourne, he had attended a lecture by Arthur Birch
who was on his way from Cambridge to take up the Chair of Chemistry at The
University of Sydney. This lecture was on the proposal that many polyketide
natural products are biosynthesised from linear chains of two-carbon units
derived from acetate. Bob recognised during the lecture that alternariol could
be formed from seven acetate units (a heptaketide) and after the lecture he
discussed its structure (then unpublished) with Birch. Birch invited him to
join him in Sydney to work on testing the polyketide hypothesis by feeding
studies with acetate. Although tempted, he was only two months into his job
with CSIRO and felt that he could not jump ship. However this meeting sparked a
lifelong interest in biosynthesis in general and of polyketides in particular.
In
early 1956 he returned to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to
take up an ICI Fellowship and began an investigation of the biosynthesis of
alternariol using 14C-labelled
acetate. His next move, in 1959, was to join the Squibb Institute for Medical
Research, New Jersey where he stayed for four years, investigating the
biosynthesis of various antibiotics and also indole alkaloids. He returned to
the UK in 1963 to take up a Senior Lectureship at Imperial College in Professor
Ernst Chain's Biochemistry Department. This was not an enjoyable time for him
as he was largely constrained to work on Chain's projects rather than his own,
as was his entitlement as an independent member of staff.
Fortunately,
the University of Surrey offered him a position as Research Professor of
Chemistry in 1969, a post which he accepted with alacrity! While there he set
up and became Founding Director of the Biotechnology Unit. He launched the
biotechnology company Biotics Ltd in 1983 and in 1987 at age 60 he took up an
Honorary Professorship at the University of Sussex.
Independent Research and Publication
Bob
began his independent work in 1956 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine and over the next 5 years published a series of papers entitled Studies in the Biosynthesis of Fungal
Metabolites. This
embraced studies of several classes of fungal metabolites among which were
phenalenones such as herquinone as well as alternariol and its congeners. The
studies involved feeding 14C-labelled precursors such as acetate, mevalonate and
simple aromatic phenolic compounds to microorganisms and isolating the labelled
metabolites. Chemical degradation then established the distribution of the
radiocarbon labels in these compounds. In addition to the biosynthetic work
ultimate proof of structure by synthesis was accomplished for several
metabolites. The structures of some of the metabolites that he isolated
resisted characterisation and were only solved in the 1970s when modern methods
such as NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry were more generally used. As a
result, publication of the structures of mould metabolites continued right up
to his retirement, the final ones being published in collaboration with a
German research group in 2016/18.
Over
the years Bob contributed immensely to biosynthetic theory and his speculative
ideas have been proved by experiment. The indole alkaloids are a large and
important class of natural products including strychnine, yohimbine and
corynanthine and speculation on their biosynthetic origin has abounded, with
such luminaries as Sir Robert Robinson, R B Woodward and others making what
appeared to be reasonable hypotheses as to their origin. It was however Bob's
suggestion in 1961 that a cyclopentanoid monoterpene was involved in the
biosynthesis that led to the final correct biosynthesis being proved
experimentally in three simultaneous publications by the research groups of
Arigoni, Scott and Battersby.
His
longstanding interest in polyketides also led him to be the first to suggest
that tetracyclic aromatic polyketides may be formed by two possible types of
folding, one of which occurs in streptomyces and the other in fungi. These S-
and F-foldings can be identified by feeding studies with [1,2-13C]-acetate. His recognition of the
subtle difference in the two phyla has permitted some reassignments of natural
product structures and no example has yet been found that contradicts the
'Thomas Rule'.
The
biosynthesis of penicillins and cephalosporin has excited the interest of many
groups over the years, and in 1981, while at Surrey, Bob and his research group
were able to make a significant experimental contribution to this work. It had
been known that the basic skeleton of these beta-lactam antibiotics was derived
from the amino acids L-cysteine and L-valine with inversion of stereochemistry
of the latter to D-valine before incorporation into a precursor tripeptide.
There were two possible mechanisms for the incorporation of the valine carboxyl
unit of the tripeptide into the final antibiotic and Bob used [18O2]-L-valine to show that one of the
two isotopically labelled oxygen atoms in this carboxyl group was lost in
conversion to penicillin V, suggesting the intermediacy of a nonribosomal
thioester.
In
1974, while at Surrey, he was among the first to employ tritium NMR to study
biosynthetic problems and this enabled him to demonstrate the locations of the
labelled tritons (protons) in biosynthetic products unambiguously. He
identified dehydrogenation in ring A of testosterone as being a stereospecific transelimination and showed that some polyketides
incorporated [3H]-acetate to yield label located
in the expected positions. This was a useful advance for, in certain examples,
it provided information not available from incorporation studies using
deuterium-labelled precursors.
In
studies using [1,2-13C]- and [1-13C,2H3]-acetate and assay by 13C NMR he demonstrated,
respectively, that the tetracyclic skeleton of oxytetracycline was derived from
a linear polyketide and that both of the deuterium (hydrogen) atoms in its
aromatic A-ring were labelled as would be expected from their polyketide
origin. Further, he showed using [1-13C,18O2]-acetate that the expected
regiospecific locations of the 18O-oxygen substituents in oxytetracycline corresponded
exclusively to those oxygen-bearing carbons that originated biosynthetically
from the carboxyl group of acetate.
He
published over 60 research papers, completing his last work in his 91st year in
collaboration with a German group. This was published posthumously. He wrote
several reviews and co-edited three multi-author books from the three UK
natural product meetings that he organised.
Business Interests
In
1983, while Director of the Biotechnology Unit at the University of Surrey, Bob
started up a new company, Biotics,
at first as a Biotechnology Consultancy specialising in the area of natural
product chemistry. However, with the aid of a grant from the European
Commission he was able to begin its main activity that of setting up a
laboratory facility in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Sciences at the
University of Sussex to isolate new compounds from plants from all over the
world. Once a standardised protocol for the extraction of plant material had
been accomplished (formalised in a spin-off company, Bioex), the most important development was setting up a
series of individual companies in developing countries in Africa, Asia and
South America to duplicate what was being done at Sussex, with the important
aim that each country (aBiotex
Associate) would
directly benefit from any discoveries made. Biotics would provide consultancy and
technical support services and act as broker between them and individual
pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies who, after screening the extracts for
bioactivity, might wish to commercialise any of the discovered compounds. By
the mid-1990s extraction facilities had been established in Costa Rica, Ghana
and Indonesia and more than 5,000 samples had been screened.
Contributions to the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
In his
role at Surrey as Director of the Biotechnology Unit, it was natural for Bob to
join the Biotechnology Group, a new RSC Interest Group which started up in
1987. He became a member of the inaugural Committee and subsequently was to
serve as its Treasurer for 10 years, 1995/2004. He chaired the organising
committee for the first 3-Day conference that the Group had ever run and this
was on the theme of natural products at the University of Sussex in 1996. He
followed this up with two more on the same theme at St Andrews in 1999 and at
Magdalen College, Oxford in 2009.
Outside Interests
Bob
learned to fly in the University of London Air Squadron in 1947 and joined the
RAF Volunteer Reserve. While in Melbourne he joined the RAAF Volunteer Reserve.
Flying was to be a lifelong interest and he even piloted a light aircraft when
he was 89! He was an excellent squash and tennis player, enjoying games with
colleagues at the Sussex campus until well into his seventies.
Family and Friends
Outside
of work, Bob was a devoted husband and father. In later life he was a loving
grandfather and great grandfather, too.
Bob
Thomas had many scientific and other friends from all over the world, partly
from his overseas jobs and partly from his travels lecturing at and organising
international conferences.
His
wife, Joan died in 2011 but he is survived by his three children Russell, Julie
and Jacki, seven grandchildren and one great grandchild.
Colin T. Bedford and Douglas W. Young
The
University Bulletin publishes obituaries. The following have appeared
since the last issue of the Suss-Ex Newsletter:
Peter Adamczyk (Bulletin, 3 May)
Jim Guild (Bulletin,
28
June)
The Suss-Ex website
More information about Suss-Ex is available
on its webpage at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/suss-ex/.
‘Suss-Ex Club’ in Google will get you there, as will http://tiny.cc/sussex, or you can find
us in the A–Z on the University’s homepage. The website has copies of past
Newsletters.
The steering committee
Suss-Ex activities are organised by a
steering committee, which currently comprises:
Sir Gordon Conway, Chair G.Conway@imperial.ac.uk
Colin Finn colinfinn@btinternet.com
Jackie Fuller jkfuller21@hotmail.com
Charles Goldie c.m.goldie@sussex.ac.uk
Arnold Goldman a.goldman@cowbeech.f9.co.uk
Steve Pavey miniperson2003@yahoo.co.uk
Adrian Peasgood adrian@peasgood.plus.com
David Smith j.d.smith@sussex.ac.uk
Paul Tofts uos@paul-tofts.org.uk
Helen Walker helenjwalker@btinternet.com
Ideas for the future
We are always seeking ideas for social occasions when we can meet
former colleagues. Please let us have your suggestions, or volunteer to join
the committee. We meet once a term, when practicable immediately before a
Suss-Ex event.
Booking Form
Please include us/me on the Harvey's Brewery Tour,
Thursday 5 September 2019 6.30 - 8.45 pm
Name(s) ------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------
your email -------------------------------------------------------
Telephone number --------------------------------------------------------
Please return this form with a cheque for £5 a head
payable to Colin Finn
22 Lockitt Way,
Kingston, Lewes, E Sussex BN7 3LG
email colinfinn@btinternet.com
It would be helpful if you could email me as soon as
possible so that I can reserve your places.