BLOG
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...
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.
Joel hits the trails in the UTA 50-km race
A friend of Joel's had to pull out of the Ultra Trail Australia 50-km race in the Blue Mountains recently and offered Joel his entry at short notice. Given that he wasn't in 'race shape' - whatever that means - he went for the social option and ran the event...
Ahhh – it’s still one of my favourite sights in science…
...a sweet 15N-HSQC titration. Last minute effort to add that extra piece of preliminary data to the grant application - and who would have believed that it would actually pan out - but it did! All thanks to Ingrid's protein production skills and Alex Norman's...
Xmas stroll in the Royal National Park
Joel and Jacqui took advantage of the cool weather to head down the RNP and see what the wildflower situation was like. It's still pretty impressive - and we even spotted some native orchids with amazing dappled petals. The bridge at Audley is very Monet-esque...
You don’t get this aesthetic beauty from Alphafold…
We have just solved a structure working with SOLES colleague Tara Christie (not to mention Toby Passioura and Rich Payne). The structure determination was a bit of a wrestle for Tara (as you'd expect at 3.9 A!), but gee - you can't help but love the packing in the...
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...
Karol Sanches
Following a PhD in Brazil and postdoctoral time with Ray Norton at Monash, Karol has joined Joel's lab - bring expertise in protein biochemistry and structural biology (NMR even!) to dive into the mechanisms underlying transcriptional regulation. She also has the...
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...