MACKAY & MATTHEWS LAB

Protein structure, function and engineering

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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...

Joel attends ICMRBS in Seoul – and checks out the impressive bike infrastructure of S. Korea

Travelled to Seoul for the ICMRBS NMR conference - with my old Ti road bike in tow to spend 3 days on 4 rivers before the meeting. It’s a 600-km purpose built separate bike path from the top to the bottom (Incheon to Busan). It was my first time in South Korea so was interested to just get a feel for the country - and what better way than to ride form one end to the other! Day 1 After arriving late ish in Seoul, I assembled the bike but then spent some time wheeling the box around the local suburb until after midnight in the rain on an ultimately fruitless attempt to find somewhere to store it while I rode. The hotel eventually took pity on me and have stored it for me The bike path is...

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...

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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Charlotte’s farewell

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 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...

A NuRD for all seasons…

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

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...

New manuscript on Biorxiv

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...