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Lab Xmas bbq and croquet afternoon
As has become our custom, we twisted Gareth's arm to book us an afternoon at the Marrickville Croquet Club for our Xmas do. It is a most excellent location - as well as the obvious croquet lawn, it features a lovely parkland setting, our own bbq, kitchen, covered seating, bbq and more...! And croquet is definitely a gam that everyone can enjoy (and they did). Many thanks to Gareth for patiently explaining the rules to many lab members and to Angela for orchestrating the event - a great time was had by all (with a little chess on the side).
Our first step into the world of invertebrate transcription factors…
As part of a collaboration with Ron Hill (formerly CSIRO - now part of the structural biology discipline here at USyd), Jason and Joel helped out (well, mostly Jason) with Ron's characterization of the insect juvenile hormone receptor. Along with the ecdysone receptor (which we're also now working on...), juvenile hormone receptor (JHR) is a ligand-binding transcription factor that binds to its cognate hormone (juvenile hormone!) and is then regulates the expression of thousands of genes involved in Arthropod development and reproduction. That means they're important for more than a million species and a quarter of the animal biomass in the oceans! JHR has been quite elusive because of...
Joel successful with NHMRC Ideas Grant (hooray!)
Grants from NHMRC and ARC are becoming a bit harder to come by in recent years, so we were very relieved to secure an Ideas Grant working in collaboration with Dr Alex Norman - a peptide chemist and existing collaborator with the group of Richard Payne in Chemistry here at USyd. The grant follows up on our initial work led by Karishma Patel in our lab and done in collaboration with Louise Walport, Toby Passioura and Hiroaki Suga to use RaPID mRNA display to design cyclic peptide inhibitors of BET bromodomains - a sought after drug target for a number of disorders. In the new four-year project, we are hoping to further improve the specificity of these peptides (which already have great...
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!
Lab members take Lorne posters by storm
Taylor, Mehdi and Athina all picked up prizes for their poster presentations at the Lorne Protein Conference this week. Poster prize success rate was overall about the same as the current NHMRC grant success rate, so a champion effort from them! No doubt they'll be...
Bogong to Hotham 2017
It has been 15 years or so since I'd run the Bogong to Hotham ultramarathon down in the Victorian Alps. I've always maintained that it is the most scenic ultra I've ever run in Australia, so I don't know why it's taken me so long to do it again! Anyway, I did get...
Kangaroo creek outing
Given the temperature today, I thought I'd head down to the Royal National Park and spend the morning wading down Kangaroo Crreek from Waterfall to Karloo Pool. Water was refreshing but almost too warm at Karloo! Then a trot back up to Heathcote and along the fire...
Matthews lab members at the Thompson Prize event
The Sydney Protein Group's annual Thompson prize event was the other day, and Neil Robertson was one of the finalists. Despite giving a sterling talk, he didn't walk away with the gong. He did however pick up the ATA Scientific Lorne travel award, while Gabrielle...
Scientists in Schools award for Joel
The Principal's Network of inner west Sydney schools recently had their awards ceremony and Joel was presented with an award to recognize the long-term connection he has had with Strathfield North Public School through the CSIRO's Scientists in Schools program -...
Taylor wins her first Australian prize
The School of Life and Environmental Sciences held its graduate research showcase recently, out at the Camden campus, and Taylor showed them how it was done, winning the prize for the best second year presentation. Nice work Taylor!
ARC grant success
Joel - working with Dave Segal from UC Davis - was lucky enough to pick up an ARC Discovery Project grant in the 2015 round to explore the creation of designer epigenetic regulators. Should be interesting...
We had a Ball!
AMOEBA ball was last night - with its theme of Under the Sea. Huge amount of work by Caitlyn, Taylor, Vania and the rest of the committee went into making a thoroughly enjoyable evening with jellyfish costumes aplenty! Photos please...
Joel awarded LabGear Discovery Science Award from ASBMB
At the recent ComBio conference in Brisbane, Joel was presented with theLabGear Discovery Science Award - which is given for distinguished contributions to the field of biochemistry and molecular biology. You can read about the award here and see the citation...
Kaavya wins Fellowship
Kaavya Krishna Kumar - a former student with Dave Gell and Joel - has just been awarded an Americal Diabetes Association fellowship to continue her work in the lab of Brian Kobilka at Stanford, where she is hammering away at the structures of membrane proteins...
Collaborative paper with Daniel Ryan at ANU comes out in JMB
Biswa, Steph and Ana can show off their latest paper now, which has come out in J Mol Biol. The paper describes the NMR structure of a domain that Daniel discovered in the chromatin remodeller CHD1 - from some careful analysis of sequence conservation - lots to be...
Joel wins Oz Rogaining Champs
Last weekend, Joel headed over to WA with rogaining companion Gill Fowler to compete in the Australian Rogaining Championships - a 24-h navigation event set in a mixture of farm and bushland near Nannup. After about 100 km of running/hiking over 24-h, Joel and Gill...