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The lab hits the big time on Youtube
We recently had a camera crew in the lab from Horticultural Innovation Australia. They are providing some funding for our work to design new, selective pesticides targeting the Varroa mite that has made its way to Australian in the last year or so and is causing much concern (it's already been causing much concern in the rest of the world for some years!). They spent a long time taking footage and in the end we made the cut to their 2023 annual report video...which you can see here. Today, the Hort Innovation annual report, tomorrow Hollywood...!
Lucien picks up a poster prize at the annual meeting of the ANZSCDB – not our usual hunting ground!
Several lab members took the opportunity to attend the annual meeting of the NSW chapter of the Aus and NZ Society for Cell and Molecular Biology - which was held at Uni of Sydney a couple of weeks ago. Posters were presented and Lucien impressed them sufficiently with his work on the chromatin remodelling enzyme CHD4 to pick up one of their poster prizes (and spread some protein biochemistry to the cell biologists!). Well done Lucien...!
Zahra and Erekle show us how it’s done at the ASBMB meeting
At the recent ASBMB annual meeting in Canberra (which was an excellent meeting, I thought - great speakers, great venue, nice size and really nice feeling), Erekle Kobhakidze (2023 Mackay lab BSc Hons student) and Zahra Falahati (Mackay lab first year PhD student) both did a most excellent job of presenting their posters - so excellent that they both picked up poster prizes for their efforts. Erekle talked about his Hons project looking at the chromatin binding proteins BRD2 and PWWP2A, whereas Zahra told people about her work starting to look at designing inhibitors of the ecdysone receptor as insecticides. Kudos to both of them! [and to the other lab members who presented at the...
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!
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...
Ingrid and Percy get (secretly) hitched
Ingrid Macindoe - postdoc in the Mackay lab - has recently tied the knot with her beau in a low-key ceremony - and with the most awesome cake! Congratulations Ingrid!
Funding opportunities for ECRs
Here is an amazing resource put together by some folks at Johns Hopkins, showing funding opportunities (and travel grant opportunities) for PhD students, postdocs and ECRs: Early career faculty funding opportunities Postdoc funding opportunities PhD funding...
Maryam submits!
Maryam looks slightly dazed for good reason - she has just handed in her PhD thesis - well inside the time allowed. Along the way, she decided that moving country to do a PhD wasn't sufficiently challenging and so upped the stakes by becoming a mother for the first...