BLOG
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!
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...
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...