MACKAY & MATTHEWS LAB

Protein structure, function and engineering

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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!!...

Jessica, Karishma and Charlotte band together to win Seed Funding Grant

Dr Jessica Zhong has recruited two other ECR colleagues - Dr Karishma Patel and Dr Charlotte Franck - to win a $50,000 reserach grant to support work aimed at developing peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) as possible solutions to the antibiotic resistance crisis. Totally awesome - and I'm pretty sure the first time *three* people who've come through the lab have been successful in a joint grant appplication! Congratulations Jessica, Karishma and Charlotte!

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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The Rock

The Rock

In news of great excitement, I can announce that there is another lab matrimonial union on its way! Taylor and Rezwan have announced their engagement - in fine style while on a small weekend getaway in Mudgee. They have decided to make the most of the whole thing...

Louise and the cloudy sea

Louise and the cloudy sea

Our RaPID collaborator from the Crick Institute in London - Louise Walport - was visiting this week (on her way to a speaking invitation at the Australian Peptide Conference) and she stopped in for a visit and to give a seminar. We managed to find a day with some...