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pavspatch · 5 years ago

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IT’S the last of my old magazine stories tonight. This is taken from the first issue of Non-League Football which was published at the start of 1988. I was one of the star guest writers. I probably qualified as a star because I wrote the piece for free.

NON-LEAGUE football is no longer treated with disdain, but there are still many who take a somewhat condescending attitude.

When on holiday, I often meet people who raise their eyebrows when they hear that I cover the semi-professional game for a living. Their idea of a non-league match is a park pitch with a handful of old-timers watching.

I take great pleasure in adding that such often find themselves greatly surprised when they discover the truth.

It once happened to a friend of mine who agreed to join me in watching Mossley play at Hyde United. We were to meet at 7.20 but he didn’t appear until 7.45pm. I asked what the problem had been and he replied that he had set off late expecting to pull on to the car park a couple of minutes before kick-off.

He was staggered that his decision meant he had to spend almost 15 minutes looking for a parking space.

Fortunately, attitudes such as this are diminishing but when people ask why choose the non-league game ahead of Manchester United or Liverpool they have a point.

Four years ago many of my colleagues were astonished that I gave up my free seat for the Manchester United v Barcelona Cup-winners’ Cup quarter-final second leg to watch Hyde United play at Worksop in the semi-finals of the NPL Cup.

The fact is I like non-league soccer. At this level a spectator is more than a statistic. He, or she, is part of the club and can talk to the manager or players after a game.

Of course, this can cause problems and I remember one incident, two seasons ago, when Hyde failed to reach the final of the Cheshire Senior Cup. They had outplayed Altrincham but Frank Carrodus scored, literally on the final whistle, to give the Conference side victory on away goals.

The Ewen Fields social club was like a mortuary. Manager Pete O’Brien walked in soon after with a face like thunder. You could have heard a pin drop.

Suddenly, a well-known supporter walked up to the bar and, putting his arm round the distraught boss, said: “Come on kid, let me tell you where you went wrong.” Perhaps I should add that blood was not spilled.

The friendliest ground I visit must be Glossop’s. The Hillmen might not be the most successful side in the world but a match reporter can always rely on a warm welcome and a smashing cup of tea.

Once, Christine, the lady who does such a good job with the teapot, told me apologetically that I would have to add milk straight from the bottle. The jug had gone missing — perhaps stolen — and she asked if I could put a little note to that effect in my Pav’s Patch column. I did so and with unbelievable results.

When I returned to Surrey Street a week later I found that the good people of Glossop had offered Christine everything from replacement jugs to tea sets and even a dinner service. In fact, enough crockery to fill a shop. In the midst of this generosity the original milk jug had mysteriously reappeared.

Non-league soccer also boasts a host of characters. One of my favourites used to be Paddy, the raffle-ticket seller at Stalybridge Celtic. It didn’t matter who you were, as you entered Bower Fold you were assailed with cry — in broad Irish tones — of “I don’t want to miss nobody tonight”. There was no way you could refuse.

Another veteran of the Tameside non-league scene is Melvin Burgess, very much a legend in his own lunchtime. I have to admit that I have had more than a little to do with his rise to glory.

Some years ago I appeared on a television quiz programme, and when faced with the question “who was Vincent Van Gogh’s neurotic psychologist?” I didn’t have a clue. Rather than pass, I desperately thought of a name and the first to come to mind was Melvin’s.

The Hyde United groundsman became an overnight star. Yet it was amazing how many people thought I had given a serious answer. “Burgess of Harley Street, London?” they would ask. “No, Markham Street, Newton”, I would reply.

It is the people involved who make non-league. From the ladies selling the pies, to those who fold and staple the programmes, it’s a team effort. However, I have to emphasise that non-league football is far from being the country bumpkin to the Barclay’s League’s city slicker.

Our game is run on very professional lines. Many clubs are more successful at raising funds than their professional counterparts. Since promotion to the fourth division was established, every club can dream of glory while a few can make realistic plans for it.

Our profile gets higher all the time. Press coverage increases and the BBC has started to screen first-round FA Cup ties.

With magazines like Non-League Football things can only get better.

Also featuring in that first edition was this piece by my North Cheshire Herald colleague David Jones about the recently-laid Baspograss pitch at Ewen Fields.

WHEN Hyde United announced plans for a plastic pitch the news was met with silence! None of their Northern Premier League rivals knew how to react.

Would opponents be given practice time to adjust to the pitch?

Would trainers be faced with players suffering from carpet burns?

Would Hyde United be prepared to provide opponents with training shoes more suitable for the synthetic surface than football boots?

In the 18 months since the £750,000 Baspograss carpet was laid, most of the teams playing on it have enjoyed the experience although one or two diehards have labelled it as unnatural.

At first, Hyde lost more matches on it than they won. In the 1986-87 season it was Christmas before the Tigers won a Saturday afternoon home match. Nowadays, some sides are beaten before they even step on it.

Playing on plastic is a different ball game. To state the obvious, sliding tackles are out.

Big, ungainly defenders who are great in mud and snow lumber around like dinosaurs. On the other hand, footballing sides love it. The bounce is highish but predictable. Passes run true and the ball sits up invitingly, waiting to be lashed at goal.

The surface is made for speed. Short passing moves that are good on the eye and good for the game often build up in the opponents’ half of the field.

After covering more than 50 matches played on plastic I have only one grumble. Games, no matter how good or exciting, can tend to be the same. I often long for a good old-fashioned mud bath, players hacking through the snow or aqua-planing through the wet.

However, while matches from Land’s End to John o’Groats have to be postponed because of the elements, Hyde’s matches go on. There’s never any danger of games piling up at Ewen Fields through frost and snow. They are called off only in the most exceptional circumstances.

Revenue comes in and gates increase as fans of neighbouring clubs, whose matches are postponed, pour through the turnstiles.

The cost of maintenance is nil. Hyde United sold their tractor, roller and seeder when they sold Ewen Fields to Tameside Council. That means more of the gate money being available to attract top players.

Ewen Fields, now one of the best grounds in non-league soccer, is part of the Tameside Leisure Park complex and the pitch is hired out every day of the week.

Northern American football champions the Manchester Spartans call Hyde their home. England’s junior lacrosse team has played several games there, and other sports played include bowls and hockey.

When Barclays League clubs find themselves playing on similar surfaces at Oldham Athletic and Preston North End they hire Ewen Fields to test the water.

Love it or hate it, plastic is here to stay.

***The plastic pitch used by Hyde United from 1986 to 1995 was Baspograss, not Astroturf. The surface was designed in Switzerland and took its name from the abbreviation for the Swiss federal office for sport — Bundesamt fur Sport. Baspograss is a sand-filled turf which is now manufactured in Melbourne, Australia. It has become more popular as a surface for tennis or hockey rather than football. Although it was said at the time that Oldham Athletic had the same pitch as Hyde, theirs was Sporturf Professional, a brand made by the Leicestershire company En-tout-cas which now specializes in tennis courts.

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naivelocus · 8 years ago

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Glycobiology: Sweet success

Chemist Lingquan Deng was presenting a poster at a 2015 meeting of the Society for Glycobiology in San Francisco, California, when a career opportunity came knocking.

At the time, Deng was a research fellow studying platelet–bacteria interactions at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He had been searching for a faculty position close to Washington DC, where his wife worked as a lawyer.

Illustrations adapted from Getty

Then, a fellow attendee at the meeting told him that his company was hiring and invited him to present his work there. The company was just outside Baltimore and Deng decided that a visit wouldn't hurt. A day after giving his presentation to GlycoMimetics, he received a job offer. And today, he works there as a research scientist, designing assays to evaluate compounds for preclinical testing for disorders such as blood cancers and sickle-cell anaemia. The skills he gained during his PhD and postdoc in synthesizing carbohydrates and studying their interactions with proteins were a perfect match with the job requirements, he says.

Deng is one of a growing number of scientists finding career opportunities studying the biology of glycans — the sugar molecules that often adorn the surface of cells. Glycans are involved in practically every area of biology, from helping cells to communicate to recognizing invading pathogens. But the field has taken a while to get off the ground, in part because glycans are dizzyingly complex and few tools were available to make them accessible to researchers.

But the situation is starting to change as funders have realized the importance of the field and begun to invest in it. In December 2009, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute announced a programme to fund resources for studying glycans, as well as training through courses, workshops and annual retreats. In 2012, the US National Research Council warned that ignoring glycans would impair research in biomedicine. A better understanding of glycoscience, it added, would deepen researchers' understanding of cancer, infectious diseases, biofuels, alternative sources of carbohydrate-based energy and the development of new carbohydrate-based materials. And in the United Kingdom, IBCarb, a network of glycoscientists funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, hosts regular workshops and training sessions on glycocience research areas. Similar programmes have also sprung up elsewhere in Europe, as well as in Canada, Asia and Australia. Since 2015, the Common Fund of the NIH has awarded 49 grants totalling US$29.2 million as part of its glycoscience programme, for projects aimed at developing affordable methods to synthesize and analyse carbohydrates and at creating databases to store and share the findings.

As a result of all this investment, academic researchers have been empowered to develop services and tools that help to close the skills and technology gap, and glycoscience is emerging as a high-impact and enticing field. And job prospects are growing in industry, too. The global market for glycobiology is expected to double to $50.1 billion by 2021, according to market-research firm BCC Research in Wellesley, Massachusetts. There are now about a dozen glycomics centres around the globe that can conduct screens or create custom reagents using state-of-the-art commercial equipment.

Glycans are so fundamental to biological processes that learning about them will help to give researchers a more comprehensive understanding of biology, even if they don't specialize in glycobiology, says Ajit Varki, who served as Deng's postdoc mentor and co-directs the Glycobiology Research and Training Center at the University of California, San Diego. It can also serve as a bridge into biomedicine for those who do not have a background in the life sciences — as was the case for Deng, who started off his research life with a bachelor's in materials science and engineering. “Glycobiologists are important in most biological drug programmes. It is a growing area,” says Spencer Williams, a carbohydrate chemist at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

" Glycobiologists are important in most biological drug programmes. "

Crazy complexity

Researchers with an understanding of glycans have a wide choice of potential applications. Glycans attach to proteins and lipids through a chemical process known as glycosylation, and in doing so determine human blood type and facilitate the binding of sperm to eggs and mediate immune-cell interactions. Together with these other biomolecules, the glycome — or total set of glycans — forms a crucial interface that transmits signals between the cell's exterior and interior worlds.

Yet getting that understanding is hard. Researchers generally study biomolecules such as DNA and peptides by synthesizing them in the lab and then probing how they react to different circumstances. But DNA and peptides are linear molecules with no branches, and tools for analysing them took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Sugars, however, have numerous branching points and each of those linkages can exhibit left- or right-handed asymmetrical forms depending on the orientation of the attached molecule. They also have exponentially more potential configurations than do DNA or proteins, and that makes them much harder to synthesize in the lab, says Peter Seeberger, a biochemist at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Munich, Germany. DNA is made up of four nucleotides (G, A, T and C), so there are theoretically 4,096 possible ways to build a string of six elements, or a 6-mer. Proteins have more building blocks (20 amino acids) and can potentially assemble into 64 million different 6-mers. But 6-mer carbohydrates can adopt 193 billion possible configurations. As a result, tools for synthesizing sugars are about 35 years behind those for DNA and peptides, Seeberger says.

Investigating the biology of the molecules is also difficult. Researchers working on DNA can type the sequences they want into an online order form and receive them a few days later, Williams says. And for protein studies, online services can deliver custom-made antibodies in 6–8 weeks.

Core SOS

Helping to bring people into the field are the increasing availability of core glycomics facilities, or centralized shared labs that offer access to specialized instruments, technologies and services for studying sugars. Decades ago, biologists wanting to know what carbohydrates a particular protein binds to would have to spend years doing tedious biochemistry experiments. Now, a core lab can run a protein sample across hundreds of carbohydrates immobilized on an array and rapidly detect which glycans the protein binds to. That allows researchers to move quickly onto functional studies and “cuts through years of difficult work”, says Williams.

Emory University's core facility in Atlanta, Georgia, has proved crucial for Brian Robinson, a postdoc investigating the role of glycans in development and wound repair. The team there is helping him to harvest glycans from key target tissues and develop custom arrays to determine which glycans bind to several proteins he is studying. His research will help him to understand how those biomolecules regulate human metabolism and immune responses.

Glycan-array services are offered by about a dozen centres worldwide. The data they generate usually enter public databases, so that other researchers who study similar proteins can see the findings. For those wanting insight into the structure of particular carbohydrates, some labs and companies (see 'Extra help') offer mass-spectrometry and analytical chromatography methods. The advances are enabling researchers such as Robinson, an MD-PhD-trained pathologist, to study the biological role of glycans much more rapidly and in enough detail for future medical applications.

Box 1: Extra help

Researchers who want to familiarize themselves with the basics of glycobiology or learn about tools and support for working with glycans can check out these resources.

Science

Essentials of Glycobiology is a textbook available free online (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2009)

Glycomics centres and core labs

Consortium for Functional Glycomics in Boston, Massachusetts

Glycosciences Laboratory, Imperial College London

Emory Comprehensive Glycomics Core in Atlanta, Georgia

Glycotechnology Core Resource, University of California, San Diego

Copenhagen Center for Glycomics

Alberta Glycomics Centre, Edmonton, Canada

Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

Japan Consortium for Glycobiology and Glycotechnology Database

New tools

Seeberger and his colleagues estimate that 90% of known molecules in the mammalian glycome can be synthesized from 45 basic structures. The team has managed to produce large quantities of about 40 such structures — now sold by GlycoUniverse, a spin-off company of his institute. The launch of the company reflects the unmet need for such technology and the entrepreneurial opportunities in the field.

To detect sugars and other biomolecules in living tissue, researchers often buy or make antibodies. However, conventional methods tend to work poorly for sugar-specific antibodies — in part because the glycan antigen can be tricky to make. Some labs are therefore working to create carbohydrates that are more likely to trigger an immune response, and thereby make antibodies — a critical research tool — easier to generate.

Carolyn Bertozzi, a chemist at Stanford University in California, has taken a different approach. She and her team feed cells with monosaccharides, or simple sugars, that sneak into biosynthetic pathways and are incorporated into glycans inside the cell.

Then, by chemically attaching tags or fluorescent dyes onto the building blocks of these sugars, researchers can visualize the glycans in their natural environment without needing the hard-to-make antibodies.

For Julia Maxson, a cell biologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, finding glycobiologists to get tips from and bounce ideas off was key. Several years ago, she was trying to determine how a gene mutation causes rare leukaemias. The mutation affects a receptor on the surface of immune cells by disabling where it attaches to a large glycan. Without the sugar, the receptor can trigger the cell to grow uncontrollably — a unusual cancer-causing pathway.

But when Maxson submitted the manuscript for publication, a reviewer wanted clearer evidence for the modification, called O-linked glycosylation. She wondered whether Bertozzi's labelling strategy might help and e-mailed her for advice on how to use it for her research.

With Bertozzi's counsel and a deeper understanding of how sugars can trigger rare leukaemias, Maxson won an NIH fellowship for postdocs transitioning to faculty positions. Today she works with Bertozzi to characterize sugar structures found uniquely on cancer cells. They hope that their findings can lead them to therapeutic strategies that precisely target tumour cells, which could pique industry interest and create research opportunities. Indeed, as scientists get a better handle on studying glycans in the lab, companies are exploring therapeutic ramifications, which should fuel growth in industrial research jobs.

Most biologics — medical products derived from natural sources — are glycosylated, which drives interest in investigating how the sugar structures influence the safety and effectiveness of therapies being developed for cancer and other diseases, Williams says.

Analytical glycobiology is so crucial, in fact, that Deng's boss is looking to hire another researcher with these skills. And just as in his case, Deng says, it looks likely that such a candidate could land a job without even formally applying.

— Nature - Issue - nature.com scie...

#Nature - Issue - nature.com scie...#Glycobiology: Sweet success

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