2017 has been a very successful year for our research group. Here are some highlights:

We successfully graduate 7 PhD students. We are very proud of this and this is a record for our group and won't be beaten for some time. Congratulations to:

• Dr Neha Dhami (2017) Interference of central metabolism (TCA cycle) to influence CHO cell productivity. UCB.
• Dr Chloe Westley (2017). Raman Spectroscopy and its Enhancement Techniques for Direct Monitoring of Biotransformations. BBSRC.
• Dr Abdu Subaihi (2017) The Development of Enhanced Raman Scattering for the Analysis of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Compounds in Biofluids.  Saudi Arabia Government.
• Dr Ewa Szula (2017) Metabolic profiling and imaging of CHO cells for fusion protein production. BBSRC.
• Dr Robert Eendebak (2017) The potential relationships between hormone biomarkers and functional and health outcomes of ageing – a multinational longitudinal cohort study of ageing in men. BBSRC.
• Dr Heidi Fisk (2017) Raman Spectroscopy for the Direct Monitoring of Microbial Biotransformations. BBSRC CASE with GSK.
• Dr Mekhala Spencer (2017) The development of Raman spectroscopy for monitoring industrial biopharmaceuticals. BBSRC CASE with Pall.

We are very grateful to all funders for these PhD projects.

In 2017 we also saw our first retirement:

• We sincerely wish Dr Mark Barley a very long and wonderful retirement and we wish you lots of joyous time with your family. We also look forward to seeing Mark from time to time in the MIB and hearing more of his travels.

Some key papers published in 2017 include:

• Our work where we showed for the first time that UV resonance Raman spectroscopy can be used to monitor enzyme-catalysed reactions as the reaction is occurring:  *Westley, C., *Fisk, H., Xu, Y., Hollywood, K.A., Carnell, A.J., Micklefield, J., Turner, N.J. & Goodacre, R. (2017) Real-time monitoring of enzyme-catalysed reactions using deep UV resonance Raman spectroscopy. Chemistry – A European Journal 23, 6983-6987. 
• The first report of spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) for the detection of counterfeit alcohol through the spirit bottle. This work also picked up some international news articles:  Ellis, D.I., Eccles, R., Xu, Y., Griffen, J., Muhamadali, H., Matousek, P., Goodall, I. & Goodacre, R. (2017) Through-container, extremely low concentration detection of multiple chemical markers of counterfeit alcohol using a handheld SORS device. Scientific Reports 7: 12082. 
• We also collaborated with Prof Gary Siuzdak from The Scripps Research Institute on online XCMS for metabolomics:  Huan, T., Forsberg, E.M., Rinehart, D., Johnson, C.H., Ivanisevic, J., Benton, H.P., Fang, M., Aisporna, A., Hilmers, B., Poole, F.L., Thorgersen, M.P., Adams, M.W.W., Krantz, G., Fields, M.W., Robbins, P.D., Niedernhofer, L.J., Ideker, T., Majumber, E.L., Wall, J.D., Rattray, N.J.W., Goodacre, R., Lairson, L.L. & Siuzdak, G. (2017)  Systems biology guided by XCMS Online metabolomics. Nature Methods 14, 461-426.

We successfully visited our favourite analytical journal 4 times in 2017, and one of these featured on the Front Cover:

• Westley, C., Xu, Y., Thilaganathan, B., Carnell, A.J., Turner, N.J. & Goodacre, R. (2017) Absolute quantification of uric acid in human urine using surface enhanced Raman scattering with the standard addition method. Analytical Chemistry 89, 2471-2477.
• Subaihi, A., Trivedi, D.K., Hollywood, K.A., Bluett, M.A., Xu, Y., Muhamadali, H., Ellis, D.I. & Goodacre, R. (2017) Quantitative on-line liquid chromatography-surface-enhanced Raman scattering (LC-SERS) of methotrexate and its major metabolites. Analytical Chemistry 89, 6702-6709.
• Fisk, H., Xu, Y., Westley, C., Turner, N.J., Micklefield, J. & Goodacre, R. (2017) From multi-step enzyme monitoring to whole-cell biotransformations: development of real-time UVRR spectroscopy. Analytical Chemistry 89, 12527-12532. 
• Kearns, H., Goodacre, R., Jamieson, L., Graham, D. & Faulds, K. (2017) SERS detection of multiple anti-microbial resistant pathogens using nanosensors. Analytical Chemistry 89, 22666-2673.

Finally, Roy was made a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW) in May and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in October.