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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 grab a photo with Hakimeh, Chandrika, Charlotte, yours truly and Karishma too - for posterity! Charlotte is moving on to industry (nearby!) - working in a great local startup company - they are definitely going to boost their productivity now! Has been great having Charlotte in the lab - always positive and always looking for ways to get past thorny problems in her work (and a mean...
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 accepted...
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 the properties of a non-Newtownian fluid (and, after all, who *wouldn't* want to do it...). Oobleck is a slurry of cornflour and water (about 1:0.7). It pours like relatively runny pancake batter, but if you apply force to it, it becomes solid for as long as the force is applied. After a decade of the school knocking back my suggestion (largely on the grounds of messiness), a new principal gave it the green light - yee haa!!...
Hooray - we (led by Jason Low, Karishma Patel in collab with @lwalport, Toby Passioura, @PayneResearch and Suga labs) just made JBC 2023 with this mRNA display work. Q: What is the best natural target seq for BET bromodomains - and which proteins have it?https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbc.2023.105482
Yep - I can say I haven't seen that before...
Beautiful, but CruEL…
Well, it's one of those classic structural biology stories... Scientist (Anjumara) purifies and crystallizes protein, gets 3-A dataset at synchrotron (with Chandrika's help). Can't be solved, but scientists ask cryoEM colleagues kindly and they acquire some images...
Ngaio, Mario and Martina
Although the proud parents missed the opportunity to give the new addition to their family a name ending in "o", we're still excited that they have recently announced baby Martina to the world. It sounds like she's reading the journals already, and planning to join...
Joels NBD…
...which means New Bike Day in bike geek lingo... Joel has spent a bit of time (well, quite a bit of time) building up a new all-road touring bike based on a custom Ti frame built by titanproduct in China. Kitted out with an old Ultegra crankset (+38T Wolftooth...
Our first mRNA display paper hits the internet in PNAS
A big paper for us - out now here! Working with Louise Walport and Toby Passioura, who were themselves working with Hiroaki Suga at the University of Tokyo at the time, we have used Suga's RaPID version of mRNA display to discover cyclic peptide inhibitors of the...
Jason heads to Blighty
Former lab member Jason Schmidberger (postdoc 2015-6) has packed up his Akubra (and his family) and made a big move to the UK to join the drug discovery alliance and consulting company Evotec. Looks like an exciting company and we look forward to hearing from him...
Big news (x2) for Michael Webster in Strasbourg
Michael - an Hons student in the lab in 2012 - has been extra productive in his postdoc in Strasbourg lately. Not only has he just had a paper come out in Science this week showing the interaction between bacterial RNA polymerase and the ribosome (the basis for the...
Lab alum Kaavya smashing it in GPCR world
This week's edition of Science magazine features an article on which Kaavya Krishna Kumar - PhD student with Dave Gell when he was here in our unit - is first-equal author. The paper describes the cryoEM structure of the glucagon receptor bound to a glucagon-like...
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...
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),...
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...
Ana strikes out in a brave new direction!
After quite a few years of being an invaluable member of the lab - and one of the only people I know who have solved structures by NMR and crystallography - and done EM as well - Ana has decided to step out of academia into the scary real world. She has done it by...