MACKAY & MATTHEWS LAB

Protein structure, function and engineering

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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!

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Kaavya wins Fellowship

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...

Joel wins Oz Rogaining Champs

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...