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Joel and Taylor go *big* at Strathfield North Public School
Joel has been doing outreach at Strathfield North Public School for about a dozen years now - working the whole time with teacher Filomena Catanzariti. For all of those years, I've desparately wanted to run over a swimming pool filled with oobleck, to demonstrate the properties of a non-Newtownian fluid (and, after all, who *wouldn't* want to do it...). Oobleck is a slurry of cornflour and water (about 1:0.7). It pours like relatively runny pancake batter, but if you apply force to it, it becomes solid for as long as the force is applied. After a decade of the school knocking back my suggestion (largely on the grounds of messiness), a new principal gave it the green light - yee haa!!...
Jessica, Karishma and Charlotte band together to win Seed Funding Grant
Dr Jessica Zhong has recruited two other ECR colleagues - Dr Karishma Patel and Dr Charlotte Franck - to win a $50,000 reserach grant to support work aimed at developing peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) as possible solutions to the antibiotic resistance crisis. Totally awesome - and I'm pretty sure the first time *three* people who've come through the lab have been successful in a joint grant appplication! Congratulations Jessica, Karishma and Charlotte!
Varroa pesticide work hits the headlines
Unsurprisingly, there has been a significant surge in interest in Varroa mites in the last month or so, with the outbreak in NSW. This has resulted in quite a lot of publicity for our work on selective pesticides to tackle the mite, with the latest being an article on the ABC News website.
Wanted: postdoc biochemist/structural biologist to work with Richard Payne, Sydney/US startup INSAMO (and me). Goal: use cyclic peptide mRNA display to design cell-permeable peptide-based protein degraders: https://usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/USYD_EXTERNAL_CAREER_SITE/job/Darlington-Campus/Postdoctoral-Researcher-in--Peptide-Based-Drug-Discovery_0131612-1
Email for more info: joel.mackay@sydney.edu.au
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?
This is supercool, but it does like folding everything, even things that are probably disordered... As always, use with caution, and consult your friendly structural biologist before investing too much in low confidence predictions.
New lab baby!
After 34 hours of labor and a helpful push from some halal KFC, Maryam and Hassan welcomed their first child yesterday! We can't wait to meet him and wish nothing but the best to their little family!
Congratulations Neil!
Congratulations are in order! Neil was selected as the Sydney Protein Group's ComBio Early Career Researcher speaker! He won a slot to give a talk at the meeting as well as $800 toward Opal card fare to go to the conference in October. The award is very...
Lorne Proteins 2018
Our structural biology contingent headed down to Lorne for this year's proteins meeting at the new Cumberland venue! Not only did the meeting have the stunning views and great talks that Lorne is known for, but Pathtech was giving out inflatable monkeys providing...
SOLES Ball 2017
This was the first year of the SOLES ball (formerly known as the Amoeba ball). Inspired by its location (the rather ritzy Australian Museum), the theme was "Night at the Museum" and everyone got the "dress like an ancient Egyptian" memo. Here are a few photos of...
Showing off the Royal National Park
Tanja Mittag from St Judes in Memphis stopped off in Sydney to give a seminar after being an invited speaker at the Lorne Protein Conference this week. Her work on liquid droplets is very interesting indeed - and it's a field that is really just beginning I think....
Graduation May 2017
Today we celebrated 4 lab graduates! Dorothy graduated with her PhD, hard-earned and well deserved! Matt, Anthony, and Gabrielle all graduated with their Hons, again well deserved! Check out some of the photos from the celebrations!
Paper featured in special edition of JBC!
JBC is putting out a special virtual issue with a focus on protein science in Australasia to honour the Lorne Protein conference and we received word that one of our papers is featured! "CHD4 Is a Peripheral Component of the Nucleosome Remodeling and Deacetylase...
Lab Retreat 2017- Hyam’s Beach
The lab headed down to Hyam's for the weekend for our annual retreat! Games were played, a delicious group dinner was had, sights were taken in, and many kangaroos were spotted (sadly after Mehdi and Diba left).
Super-duper HSQC titration data
Karishma has been busily recording HSQC spectra for a whole set of protein-peptide interactions we're looking at (let's see - there are 18 peptides and 6 proteins - so she has about 108 titrations to do if we go the whole hog). So far, a decent proportion of them...
Taylor Goes to New Zealand!
Over the holiday shutdown period, Taylor jumped over the Tasman for her first New Zealand visit (in the 11th hour of her PhD of course). It was an 8 day solo adventure with a jam packed schedule. One night in Auckland, 2 days in Rotorua, a...
Undiscovered Sydney – discovered (with Dave Gell)
Dave Gell was visiting from U Tasmania this week to determine the structure of a protein he has been working on for some time. Mario and Henry had kindly purified some protein for Dave - who's been busy with other work - and they grew some *beautiful* and very...
New lab paper accepted FEBS J
Mario's long journey to publish the carefully methodical work he and others have done on the inter-subunit interaction network within the NuRD complex has finally come to fruition as his paper is now accepted in FEBS J. We're quite fond of the paper because it...