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Angela wins the oldest shaking incubator competition!
Our lab manager, Angela Nikolic, learned of a competition hosted by In Vitro Technologies on "who has the oldest shaking incubator" in all of Australia and New Zealand. She applied with our Infors Unitron Shaker that dated back to Dec 2000! She has won us a brand new Infors Celltron Shaker! Well done Angela!
Jessica hands in
Always a big milestone in the PhD journey, Jessica Zhong has clicked the upload button (which isn't quite the same as the old days with the endless photocopying and page juggling, but still...) and submitted her thesis (and now is an expert on definite articles), which was focused on the biochemical analysis of CHD4 - the chromatin remodelling component of the NuRD complex. Her project landed her a Nature Commun paper so far, and with the experiments she's about to finish off, hopefully another good paper too. And it would be remiss of me to not mention that the project has been a fantastic collaboration with Antoine van Oijen and Bishnu Paudel at University of Wollongong - big...
Xavier receives encouragement – in the form of cash!
Xavier Reid, who started his PhD in the lab in 2019, has used his creative writing skills to pick up anATA Scientific Encouragement Award in March this year. You can read all about his musings on intelligent robots at the ATA website. The award brings with it a tasty $1500, which I presume he is going to put towards the purchase of his first intelligent robot... Nice one Xavier!
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.
Now *this* is an insect!
You thought that it was the snakes, scorpions, sharks and spiders that you had to worry about in Australia. No one warned you about the monster stick insects though... check this out. You could put a leash on it and take it for a walk! The body was 20 cm...
Two more visiting academics in the lab
A/Profs Kylie Walters and Hiroshi Matsuo are visiting the lab for 2 months from the University of Minnesota. Kylie and Hiroshi are protein NMR spectroscopists with interests in areas including protein-nucleic acid interactions and ubiquitin structure and function.
Joel becomes first Prof. of Zinc Fingers
Well, not quite, but I have just been promoted to Level E - Professor - and may need to choose a title. Any suggestions?
Dave heads for greener pastures (literally)
In a mixture of good news and bad news, all rolled into one, Dave Gell is making a move down south and moving his laboratory to the University of Tasmania in Hobart. It is bad news for us, because Dave has been an absolute cornerstone of the lab, from the time he...
Degrees of separation in science
A couple of days ago, Jacqui and I attended a dinner for the announcement of the Prime Minister's Science Prizes in Canberra. We were surprised to bump into the mother of one of Jacqui's former PhD students (Janet Deane). As it turned out, her father was part of a...
Visiting academic in the lab
A/Prof. Siavoush Dastmalchi is visiting the lab for 6 months from Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran. Siavoush did his PhD at the University of Sydney with Bret Church (and also did some NMR work with us during that period). He has come to brush up on...
Socks and Soumya win poster prizes at the ECPM
Sock Yue Thong won the prize for the best poster and Soumya Joseph won third prize for her poster at the East Coast Protein Meeting, held in Coffs Harbour over the weekend. The ECPM is a joint initiative of the Sydney Protein Group and the Queensland Protein Group...
Mitch wins Cancer Institute NSW Award
Mitch O'Connell has followed in Eija's Finnish footsteps. After winning a University Medal for his undergraduate degree in 2008, Mitch has been successful in winning a Cancer Institute NSW Research Scholar Award, which will help fund his research project and...
Fionna wins a fellowship
Fionna Loughlin, who finished her PhD with Joel in 2007, has just been awarded an ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on the structural biology of protein-RNA complexes in the laboratory of Fred Allain in Zürich. Well done Fionna - thoroughly deserved!
Joel sneaks home in English 100-km event
Joel teamed up with Richard Green, Jaap Bakker and Jonathan Worswick to win the inaugural Oxfam Trailtrekker 100-km race in the Yorkshire Dales recently. The four of them completed the course (running together), which took in parts of the Pennine Way and the Dales...
Richard Grant hits the headlines
Richard - ex-postdoctoral associate with Joel - is now working for the Faculty of 1000 in London, trying to make the scientific literature more easily accessible, and was recently interviewed about his predilection for blogging in The Australian newspaper [read the...
Its official! We work in Sydney’s ugliest building!
Letter to the editor in The Sydney Morning Herald (Tues 19 May, 2009): Response to: "Star City, the ugliest building in Sydney (Letters, May 18)?" "The interior, perhaps, but from the outside it is a model of grace and beauty compared with the UTS Tower, voted...