A wide range of household products as diverse as foodstuffs, cleaning materials and personal care products, rely on the ability to modify starting materials on an industrial scale to generate products with the desired properties. One key requirement in many cases is the introduction of charged groups, to bestow the desired characteristics such as the ability to gel, to bind other materials or to behave as detergents. This can often be achieved by the addition of charged groups and one key way to do this is to add a sulfate group. The problem is that this is done currently using toxic and environmentally damaging chemicals. The global market for such household products is huge and growing, for example, for personal care products is $ 7.35 Bn with annual growth of 7%. Our industrial collaborator, Unilever, with whom we have a long and well-established working relationship, is a major global player, with around 50% of the market share. Consumer sensitivity to environmental concerns, particularly with existing petroleum-based products and the use of harsh chemicals, arising from their resistance to biological degradation, the generation of greenhouse gases and other environmental issues during their production or disposal, has culminated in commercial pressure to develop sustainable alternatives. The current method of achieving sulfation industrially, involving aggressive chemicals which show poor selectivity and are environmentally damaging, needs to be replaced with a one employing renewable resources without damaging the environment. Together with Unilever, we aim to develop methods by which sulfation can be achieved using enzymes, thereby avoiding these problems. The route we propose - engineering enzymes to carry out this modification - offers both better control of the process and, crucially, enables environmentally responsible production of biodegradable products and waste. Until now, the application of enzymes to these areas has been hindered by the problems of readily detecting the modifications that have been made and, owing to the cost of some of the materials involved, also of developing a commercially feasible method of adding sulfate groups. Now, however, as a result the combination of preliminary work carried out by ourselves and Unilever, as well as other technological advances, both of these problems can be solved. This project will exploit these improved technologies, together with our established expertise in enzyme production to achieve two principal aims: (i) to assemble the technology (termed the high throughput enzyme-engineering platform) with which to produce and optimise enzymes that will be suitable for application to a wide range of enzyme-driven processes of industrial relevance and, (ii) to illustrate the use of this platform to select and optimise suitable enzymes, using a class of enzymes that can add sulfate groups to naturally-occurring and renewable starting materials such as complex sugars (polysaccharides) and lipids (glycolipids) from plants. The potential for industrial application of these sulfated products will then be assessed by Unilever, a major global company with a developed sustainability agenda that, in the future, will enable delivery of clean, renewable products.

Handling flexible materials is common in industrial, domestic and retail applications, e.g., evaluating new fabric products in the fashion industry, sorting clothes at home and replenishing shelves in a clothing store. Such tasks have been highly dependent on human labour and are still challenging for autonomous systems due to the complex dynamics of flexible materials. This proposal aims to develop a new visuo-tactile integration mechanism for estimating the dynamic states and properties of flexible materials while they are being manipulated by robot hands. This technique offers the potential to revolutionise the autonomous systems for handling flexible materials, allowing inclusion of their automated handling in larger automated production processes and process management systems. While the initial system to be developed in this work is for handling the textiles, the same technology would have the potential to be applied in handling other flexible materials including fragile products in the food industry, flexible objects in manufacturing and hazardous materials in healthcare.

The recent advances in high through-put data generation for DNA/RNA, proteins and metabolites has resulted in a paradigm shift in how we seek to answer some of the fundamental questions of biology. Over the past decade, significant amounts of these large data sets encompassing resident microbial communities (microbiome), specific host responses and environmental conditions have been generated. To date the integration and exploitation of these complex datasets in a structured way has been highly problematic. However recent advancements in in-silico methodologies can for the first time help to unlock the full potential of these data, facilitating improved understanding of and discovery of novel interventions for host-microbiome interactions. With the advent of these technologies it has become apparent that interactions between environmental, host and microbial factors give rise to the various changes in skin homeostasis that result in cosmetic conditions such as dry skin and dandruff. Dandruff and dry skin are widespread conditions impacting over 50% of the world's population affecting quality of life including self/body confidence and their treatment is the basis of a sector worth over 10bn Euros annually. In this study, in collaboration with our industrial partners, Unilever, we will investigate the physiological changes of normal, dry skin and dandruff through unique integration of computational biology and modelling with microbiology. We will develop a computational and experimental platform for skin host-microbiome interactions to reveal the microbial mechanisms involved in different skin states. Using this approach, we will identify and evaluate new therapeutic targets as well as reveal the underlying physiological events in skin homeostasis. Using a combination of skin samples collected by tape strips from normal, dry skin and dandruff, as well as data generated from reconstituted skin models and keratinocyte monolayers, we will generate data that accurately describes skin-microbe interactions. we will also identify the key species and strains of Malassezia, Staphylococcus and Cutibacterium associated with different skin states. In parallel by using the available multi-omics data from Unilever and the public domain, we will generate computational models for microbes and host skin tissue and cells. Having both in-silico and in-vitro set ups, we will investigate the impact of key metabolites and anti-metabolites on the relationship between the skin and key microbes and microbial communities. Finally, we will explore the impact of key host factors, such as cytokines (e.g. IL-36, IL-1, IL-17, IL-20 family) and antimicrobial peptides (e.g. beta-defensins, S100, LL-37) on the resident microbial communities. We will then categorize these therapies based on their mode of action on skin-microbiomes interactions. The new therapeutic targets generated and validated through this combination of both computational and experimental techniques can then be tested for host toxicity and efficacy. This cutting-edge integrative platform could be easily extended to identify new targets or drugs for different microbial constituents in human body, their association with a range of hosts and pathologies. As such it will delineate an entirely novel approach to investigating host-microbiome interactions that will have broad applicability across a wide range of sectors, including medical, veterinary, cosmetic and agricultural.

Internal communication does more than transfer information, it infuses organizations with meaning. This 3-year research programme traces the history of internal communication in the UK. As a specialized activity internal comms originates from company magazines in the late 19th century. Since then magazines have morphed into complex systems of intranets, emails, internal social media, company newsletters, road shows, briefing groups, huddles, blogs and roadshows. It is estimated that around 45k professionals are currently engaged in internal communication. The history of internal communication will be studied through the archives of 14 prominent organisations, where research access has been secured: BBC; Boots; British Airways; British Army; British Rail; Cadbury; GlaxoSmithKline; HSBC; John Lewis; National Coal Board; Prudential Insurance; Royal Mail; Shell; and Unilever. In addition the archives for 5 professional bodies and a leading consultancy will be used: AB Communications, which provides internal comms for prominent global and UK organisations; Chartered Institute of Marketing; Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; Chartered Institute of Public Relations; Institute of Internal Communication; and the Industrial Society. The British Library, which has extensive historical holdings of internal comms, has also agreed to assist with disseminating findings from the research. The changing form and content of internal comms will be mapped, tracing the transformation of the magazine format into the contemporary system of internal comms that aims at enhancing employee engagement, voice, and corporate identity. Discussions about the role of communication will be examined in documents such as minutes from board meetings and reports. Internal comms practitioners and company archivists theorise their own practices. The discourses of practitioners and their relation to actual practices will be examined through communications produced by professional bodies and consultants. Historians accept that nations have been imagined as communities through national newspapers and television channels. Corporations can also be seen as communities that have been imagined through internal comms. Three discourses of imagined communities have legitimated both organisations and the role of internal comms: esprit de corps, where the corporation is imagined as an extended family or military unit; brand community, where employees are imagined as part of community with consumers; and democratic polity, where the employees are imagined as citizens with internal comms as a free press holding government to account. The discourse of brand communities is now predominant, but the interplay between these discourses will be examined throughout the 20th century. Management scholars refer to the instrumental use of the past by corporations as "rhetorical history", which is usually studied in relation to uses of the past in the present for external marketing communication with customers. But references to the past featured in company magazines almost from the outset. The research will produce an account of how rhetorical history has been used in the past both to legitimate organisations to their employees, and to legitimate the role of internal comms. This research program will produce a theoretically informed history of internal comms as a reference point for contemporary debates, such as the response of organisations to the coronavirus pandemic. Company archivists will be interested in how their work informs internal comms, and how internal comms constitutes archives. The internal comms profession will be enhanced by historical debate, and organisations will be interested in finding out what made for effective internal comms in the past. As the wider public consists of many current and former members of large organisations, there will be general interest in remembering how these bodies communicated with their members in the past.

A vital challenge for modern engineering is the modelling of the multiscale complex particle-liquid flows at the heart of numerous industrial and physiological processes. Industries dependent on such flows include food, chemicals, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, oil, mining, river engineering, construction, power generation, biotechnology and medicine. Despite this large range of application areas, industrial practice and processes and clinical practice are neither efficient nor optimal because of a lack of fundamental understanding of the complex, multiscale phenomena involved. Flows may be turbulent or viscous and the carrier fluid may exhibit complex non-Newtonian rheology. Particles have various shapes, sizes, densities, bulk and surface properties. The ability to understand multiscale particle-liquid flows and predict them reliably would offer tremendous economic, scientific and societal benefits to the UK. Our fundamental understanding has so far been restricted by huge practical difficulties in imaging such flows and measuring their local properties. Mixtures of practical interest are often concentrated and opaque so that optical flow visualisation is impossible. We propose to overcome this problem using the technique of positron emission particle tracking (PEPT) which relies on radiation that penetrates opaque materials. We will advance the fundamental physics of multiscale particle-liquid flows in engineering and physiology through an exceptional experimental and theoretical effort, delivering a step change in our ability to image, model, analyse, and predict these flows. We will develop: (i) unique transformative Lagrangian PEPT diagnostic methodology for engineering and physiological flows; and (ii) innovative Lagrangian theories for the analysis of the phenomena uncovered by our measurements. The University of Birmingham Positron Imaging Centre, where the PEPT technique was invented, is unique in the world in its use of positron-emitting radioactive tracers to study engineering processes. In PEPT, a single radiolabelled particle is used as a flow follower and tracked through positron detection. Thus, each component in a multiphase particle-liquid flow can be labelled and its behaviour observed. Compared with leading optical laser techniques (e.g. LDV, PIV), PEPT has the enormous and unique advantage that it can image opaque fluids, and fluids inside opaque apparatus and the human body. To make the most of this and image fast, complex multiphase and multiscale flows in aqueous systems, improved tracking sensitivity and accuracy, dedicated new radiotracers and simultaneous tracking of multiple tracers must be developed, and new theoretical frameworks must be devised to analyse and interpret the data. By delivering this, we will enable multiscale complex particle-liquid flows to be studied with unprecedented detail and resolution in regimes and configurations hitherto inaccessible to any available technique. The benefits will be far-reaching since the range of applications of PEPT in engineering and medicine is extremely wide. This multidisciplinary Programme harnesses the synergy between world-leading centres at Birmingham (chemical engineering, physics), Edinburgh (applied maths) and King's College London (PET chemistry, biomedical engineering) to develop unique PEPT diagnostic tools, and to study experimentally and theoretically outstanding multiscale multiphase flow problems which can only be tackled by these tools. The advances of the Programme include: a novel microPEPT device designed to image microscale flows, and a novel medical PEPT validated in small animals for translation to humans. The investigators' combined strengths and the accompanying wide-ranging industrial collaborations, will ensure that this Programme leads to a paradigm-shift in complex multiphase flow research.