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Joel tackles the Stoos Trail ultra in Switzerland
Report from Joel: To cap off a week of hiking with Jacqui in the Swiss alps last week - and get a last glimpse at this extraordinarily scenic part of the world, I turned up for the 46-km Stoos Trail ultramarathon. It was a very local, low-key event with several distances available (only about 140 people in the ultra), meaning no need for an entry lottery like some events - he could just enter a few weeks prior and Bob’s your uncle. And of course the other reason I chose it was the scenery…is located on a mountain trail near Brunnen, south of Zurich - though hard to go wrong in Switzerland… Unfortunately the scenery comes at a price - the price being the initial 1200-m climb, an...
May graduation, 2024
We had a bumper edition of graduation recently with Kim receiving her PhD and Andrea and Erekle graduating with their BSc Hons (1st class) degrees. Kim has found herself a postdoc position in neurobiology - just where she was hoping to end up!), Andrea has committed to a PhD in the lab to pursue her structural biology ambitions (and is a few months in already), and Erekle is looking to head to Europe to do a research Masters. Yay everyone!
Auf wiedersehen Jakob…
Jakob Helmbrecht bravely ventured down under, risking crocodile attacks and leech bites to work in the lab under the tutelage of Clement and Lucien for 5 months - and he is now setting sail back to Germany to polish his Masters off by embarking on a little more research. It sounds like he might have itchy feet to venture overseas again, so who knows - we might see him back in Australia before too long... His farewell dinner featured Clement presenting his present - and Jakob's last chance (for the time being) to sample Australian Thai food...
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!
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...
New lab preprint – on the mechanism of CHD4-driven chromatin remodelling
Our new preprint has taken forever but is now on biorxiv - WHEW! We (Jessica, Hakimeh, and Bishnu - with great support from Jason, Ana, Stefan, Chandrika - and Santosh at the Synchrotron) examine the auxiliary domains of chromatin remodeller CHD4, finding an IDR...
New manuscript on Biorxiv
Sandra Hake, our collaborator with a strong interest in histone variants and chromatin in general, has uploaded her latest manuscript to Biorxiv - a paper that focuses on the function of the chromatin associated protein HMG20A. Hakimeh has put her protein...
April graduation!
Last week, we had one of the first live graduations we'd had for some time, and it was a bumper one - Angus, Marcus and Jen all graduated with their undergraduate degrees, as did Lou Irish from Ann's lab. So, it was all over to the old quad to congratulate them and...
Ingrid becomes a mother….again!
Ingrid was as organized as usual, and gave birth to baby Scarlett at 7:20 am on April 9. Current reports are that Scarlett has not learned yet to cry, but communicates in a series of small toy-like squeaks - they can only hope that continues for some time......