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It’s raining babies!
Recent PhD graduate Mehdi and his wife Diba have just welcomed a new family member - their daughter Rosha who was borne at 00:34 on 9 August this year. All are healthy and raring to go on their latest project. And you thought the NuRD complex was challenging, Mehdi! 🙂 Congratulations Mehdi and Diba!
Jason wins drug discovery seed grant
Jason has been successful in winning a $15,000 grant from the ECR seed funding program of the USyd Drug Discovery Initiative. This grant will help him pursue his mRNA-display based hunt for inhibitors of oncogenic transcription factors. Super stuff Jason!
Did I already mention that there are a lot of lab babies appearing lately?
Announcing the arrival into the world of Oren Lucev O’Connell, born on last Saturday morning at 3:49 am (GMT -4) and weighing in at 8lb 2oz. Direct report from new dad Mitch: "Mum (Annabelle) and baby are doing wonderfully, and we’re having fun adjusting to our new life at home. Not at all what I expected when I jumped on that plane to UC Davis all those years ago to collaborate with the Segal lab." Everyone seems to have been busy during the pandemic! Mitch has been running a lab at the University of Rochester in New York for the last couple of...
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!
Neil’s paper accepted at Ang. Chemie
Congratulations to Neil, who has just had a paper accepted by Angewandte Chemie that describes his elegant FRET-based binding assays. It is available online here (or at Pubmed here) or if you prefer your science in German, here. Herzliche Gluumlckwuumlnsche,...
Back-to-back reviews from the lab in Curr. Opin. Struct. Biol.
We were lucky enough to have two reviews in the most recent issue of Current Opinions in Structural Biology - in the "Sequences and topology" section. Ngaio and Jacqui told the world about Mechanisms of DNA-binding specificity and functional gene regulation by...
Mackay lab science on Triple J and the ABC
Our recent paper in JBC on the role of CHD4 in the NuRD complex was picked up by the ANU media office because of Daniel's involvement in the paper. They put together a media release and it was picked up by several news outlets. Daniel was interviewed and there were...
A new visitor to the lab arrives from Tabriz in Iran
We have a new visiting lab member - Hakimeh is a PhD student with Siavoush Dastmalchi at the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran and has joined us for 6 months to try to collect some structural and binding data on a zinc-finger transcription factor with a...
Dorothy’s paper accepted at NAR
Dorothy has had a pretty painless first foray into the world of publishing papers with her paper on the RNA-binding properties of the transcription factor YY1 being accepted at Nucleic Acids Research. We were very pleased with the outcome given that we weren't...
Lab Hyams beach trip all done
The annual pilgrimage to Hyams Beach has been and gone - perfect weather and we didn't even get told off for being too noisy! Photos here.
Our latest CHD4 work makes it into JBC
Well, this one wasn't *quite* as straightforward as the Protein Science paper I mentioned recently, but in the end the reviewers *did* actually improve the paper I think. You can read about the efforts of Jason (L), Sarah, Ana, Hinnerk, Mario, Mattias and Nick -...
Our first EM data published in Protein Science
Whew! It was quite a roller coaster ride to this paper. After seeing an abstract by John Schwabe's group in Leicester that covered work very similar to what we've been hammering away at for a while, we scrambled to get a paper prepared and submitted. During the...
Bye bye Chay! – and hello Ninnie
Today we said bon voyage (or perhaps veilige reis) to Chayenne - our Dutch intern who has been with us for the last year. I'm pretty sure she qualified as the youngest person we have had in the lab, and she became an integral part of the Mackay lab while she was...
Ana’s CHD4 paper comes out
Ana's paper describing the structure of a slightly cryptic domain from CHD4 has come out in JBC. Check out the paper here or check out the structure here. As you can see here, it looks sort of like an HMG-box domain (CHD4 is in red - HMG-box domains are in grey)....
Ivan hands in!!
In a momentous occasion - for both Jacqui and Ivan - Ivan has handed in his PhD thesis. It was a mission, but it is a mission that has been completed!
Roland lands a job!
Roland - postdoc in the lab from 2006 till 2011 - has landed himself a Level B academic position in the School of Science and Health at Western Sydney University. He and Liza will make a great wife-and-husband team as they continue to build their lab together out...