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Structural biology’s annual Xmas croquet picnic – 2024 edition
Perfect weather and a newly renovated lawn greeted us upon arrival at the Marrickville Croquet Club - and of course our resident croquet host-tutor, the recently un-retired Prof. Gareth Denyer. A total of 28 of the Structural Biology cooperative turned up, many bringing home-made food, including some national specialties; I was quite partial to the Georgian Nigvziani Badrijani (cheesy flatbread) and Kachapuri (eggplant and walnuts), Clement's potato salad and Shahnaz' fishcakes [with Alysha's Kourabiedes (Greek Xmas cookies) and Jacqui's Australasian pavlova - kiwifruit on one half and mango on the other - getting special mention for dessert. OK - I had some of Milad's baklava too...]....
Honours ice cream celebration!
The BSc Hons students for 2024 have given all the talks, submitted all the theses and generally ticked all the boxes that are required for the year and have had the chance to enjoy a well deserved gelato from Messina up in Newtown. Well done Simone, Jenny and Angela from the Mackay lab and Caitlyn, Esther and Sienna from other parts of Structural Biology - time for a breather!
Clement’s iGEM team win big!
Clement (along with syn bio lab heads Dr Yu Heng Lau and Dr Constance Bailey) coached a team of undergraduate students - of mixed year and mixed degree major - for this year's iGEM competition, which they got to present in Paris at the big jamboree. They were incredibly successful - winning third place overall and the best therapeutic project prize. So, third out of 438 teams from all over the world - that's a big win! Super congratulations! Clement also took time to visit Karishma in Oxford, reporting that she was going well and that her magic crystallography fingers were still operational in the northern hemisphere, having crystallized a protein while it was in the...
Have been off X for months but had to log in to see response to AF3. I am much less smart than the authors - but am I (and Erin) the only ones to think that the helical afros that it makes out of IDRs is totally weird? Am I missing something?
Amazing story from the lab down the corridor - @RezwanSidd working with Sandro Ataide and Ruth Hall in @SydneySOLES at @Sydney_Science - now they will be thrown into the gladiators' pit I suspect with the other protagonists that prowl this landscape! 🙂 Great piece of work!
Joel attends ICMRBS in Seoul – and checks out the impressive bike infrastructure of S. Korea
Travelled to Seoul for the ICMRBS NMR conference - with my old Ti road bike in tow to spend 3 days on 4 rivers before the meeting. It’s a 600-km purpose built separate bike path from the top to the bottom (Incheon to Busan). It was my first time in South Korea so...
Joel tackles the Stoos Trail ultra in Switzerland
Report from Joel: To cap off a week of hiking with Jacqui in the Swiss alps last week - and get a last glimpse at this extraordinarily scenic part of the world, I turned up for the 46-km Stoos Trail ultramarathon. It was a very local, low-key event with several...
May graduation, 2024
We had a bumper edition of graduation recently with Kim receiving her PhD and Andrea and Erekle graduating with their BSc Hons (1st class) degrees. Kim has found herself a postdoc position in neurobiology - just where she was hoping to end up!), Andrea has...
Auf wiedersehen Jakob…
Jakob Helmbrecht bravely ventured down under, risking crocodile attacks and leech bites to work in the lab under the tutelage of Clement and Lucien for 5 months - and he is now setting sail back to Germany to polish his Masters off by embarking on a little more...
Lab alumnus Michael Webster publishes his first last-author paper – in Cell!
Michael, a BSc Hons student in the lab in 2012, now has an independent group leader position at the highly regarded John Innes Center for Plant Science in the UK. He has just reported his structure of the RNA polymerase from plant plastids - in a paper in Cell - in...
Lab walk in the Blue Mountains
We ventured out into the lower Blue Mountains for a day hike on Sat 24 Feb. The forecast was that there might be some rain. And there was. The first couple of hours were persistent - though not heavy - rain. Fortunately the canopy protected us from some direct...
The lab hits the big time on Youtube
We recently had a camera crew in the lab from Horticultural Innovation Australia. They are providing some funding for our work to design new, selective pesticides targeting the Varroa mite that has made its way to Australian in the last year or so and is causing...
Lucien picks up a poster prize at the annual meeting of the ANZSCDB – not our usual hunting ground!
Several lab members took the opportunity to attend the annual meeting of the NSW chapter of the Aus and NZ Society for Cell and Molecular Biology - which was held at Uni of Sydney a couple of weeks ago. Posters were presented and Lucien impressed them sufficiently...
Zahra and Erekle show us how it’s done at the ASBMB meeting
At the recent ASBMB annual meeting in Canberra (which was an excellent meeting, I thought - great speakers, great venue, nice size and really nice feeling), Erekle Kobhakidze (2023 Mackay lab BSc Hons student) and Zahra Falahati (Mackay lab first year PhD student)...
Flojo – a life
With great sadness, Jacqui and Joel shepherded Flojo to her last big sleep at the vet on the weekend. She was with us for 20 of her 22 years and was a part of our lives for so long. We were so lucky to have her as a companion. The house seems much quieter today -...
Xavier graduates (again!)
Joel managed to miss the graduation by being on the other side of the world but Jason was a more than worthy replacement - ...and Jessica and Karishma also sneaked into the academic procession (I like it - nice work!) so that Xavier got...
Parenthood comes knocking again for Jason!
We welcome Isabelle into the world - and more specifically into Jason and Mel's house. They are currently trying to work out a routine that allows all five members of the household to achieve their goals (e.g., getting fed, sleeping, doing mass spectrometry etc) in...