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Structural biology’s annual Xmas croquet picnic – 2024 edition
Perfect weather and a newly renovated lawn greeted us upon arrival at the Marrickville Croquet Club - and of course our resident croquet host-tutor, the recently un-retired Prof. Gareth Denyer. A total of 28 of the Structural Biology cooperative turned up, many bringing home-made food, including some national specialties; I was quite partial to the Georgian Nigvziani Badrijani (cheesy flatbread) and Kachapuri (eggplant and walnuts), Clement's potato salad and Shahnaz' fishcakes [with Alysha's Kourabiedes (Greek Xmas cookies) and Jacqui's Australasian pavlova - kiwifruit on one half and mango on the other - getting special mention for dessert. OK - I had some of Milad's baklava too...]....
Honours ice cream celebration!
The BSc Hons students for 2024 have given all the talks, submitted all the theses and generally ticked all the boxes that are required for the year and have had the chance to enjoy a well deserved gelato from Messina up in Newtown. Well done Simone, Jenny and Angela from the Mackay lab and Caitlyn, Esther and Sienna from other parts of Structural Biology - time for a breather!
Clement’s iGEM team win big!
Clement (along with syn bio lab heads Dr Yu Heng Lau and Dr Constance Bailey) coached a team of undergraduate students - of mixed year and mixed degree major - for this year's iGEM competition, which they got to present in Paris at the big jamboree. They were incredibly successful - winning third place overall and the best therapeutic project prize. So, third out of 438 teams from all over the world - that's a big win! Super congratulations! Clement also took time to visit Karishma in Oxford, reporting that she was going well and that her magic crystallography fingers were still operational in the northern hemisphere, having crystallized a protein while it was in the...
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.
Flojo – a life
With great sadness, Jacqui and Joel shepherded Flojo to her last big sleep at the vet on the weekend. She was with us for 20 of her 22 years and was a part of our lives for so long. We were so lucky to have her as a companion. The house seems much quieter today -...
Xavier graduates (again!)
Joel managed to miss the graduation by being on the other side of the world but Jason was a more than worthy replacement - ...and Jessica and Karishma also sneaked into the academic procession (I like it - nice work!) so that Xavier got...
Parenthood comes knocking again for Jason!
We welcome Isabelle into the world - and more specifically into Jason and Mel's house. They are currently trying to work out a routine that allows all five members of the household to achieve their goals (e.g., getting fed, sleeping, doing mass spectrometry etc) in...
Charlotte’s farewell
Last Thursday we celebrated Charlotte leaving. Well, I mean we celebrated the time that she had with us, if you see what I mean. Brewdog in Everleigh was a great location - good beers, good (vegetarian) food and very long tables (just what we needed). We managed to...
Jacqui spins it up!
Jacqui has been training at The Movement Academy in Alexandria, and demonstrated her latest act in their December 2022 showcase. Check it out if you want to see what she's been spending her spare time doing! Autograph requests...
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...
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...
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...
Varroa research gets a mention in Japan!
Japan's Science and Technology Agency has picked up the recent publicity around our Varroa-mite-specific pesticide project by featuring it briefly on their website. Tash will be able to read it to...
A NuRD for all seasons…
...is the title of our new review that is going to appear in Trends in Biochem Sci very soon. A sneak preview is here. In the paper - shaped by Xavier and Jason - we ponder on the observation that multiple paralogues are observed for all members of our favourite...
Varroa work in the spotlight
Our work to design safer insecticides - particularly ones targeting honeybee pests (which was funded recently by Horticultural Innovations Australia) - has become more immediately topical overnight with a report (and followups 1 2) that the dreaded Varroa mite has...
Rogaine outing with collaborator Alyson Ashe
Joel and Alyson participated in the 2022 Paddy Pallin 6-hour rogaine yesterday - organized by the NSW Rogaining Association. Weather was perfect and had a fantastic outing - Alyson's first ever rogaine, but she smashed it - a complete natural. Running strongly the...