A growing team of groundbreaking scientists around the world are now sharing their lab notebooks online
Within a month (hopefully) I’ll be convincing C2C12 myoblast cells to express all kinds of mutant ALK2 to test its activity and interactions with other proteins within the cell. I’ll be doing this by treating them so that they’ll take up pieces of circular DNA (plasmids) that express those mutant proteins (i.e. transfecting them). Seeing Read More …
Hello! Recently, I co-authored a manuscript titled, “In depth analysis of kinase cross screening data to identify chemical starting points for inhibition of the Nek family of kinases” [http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/md/c7md00510e#!divAbstract]. As a part of this manuscript we identified several chemical starting points that can be used for the design of narrow spectrum and potent Nek kinase Read More …
USP5 is one of many USP proteins that contains a zinc finger ubiquitin binding domain (Zf-UBD). My goal is to develop small molecules that inhibit USP5 selectively. So, it’s important to make sure that the pocket where the compound will bind is sufficiently and structurally different from other USPs. I did a multiple sequence alignment Read More …
Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) is a type of brain tumour in the brainstem which is highly aggressive and occurs in children. Treatment options for DIPG are very limited because these tumours do not respond to the chemotherapy drugs currently available for adult gliomas. Whole genome and exome sequencing identified several frequently mutated genes in Read More …
ROS-dependent huntingtin interactions in mouse striatal cells
In order to study NSD3 in the context of acute myeloid leukemia, I first need to determine the best reagents/tools. This includes characterizing model cell lines as well as antibodies that can be used for future experiments. Here I looked at the expression of NSD3 by western blotting in three AML cell lines using a Read More …
Background What is the link between a rare genetic disease that causes soft tissues to turn to bone, and a lethal childhood brain cancer? At first glance, with such different clinical phenotypes, it seems unlikely there could be any link, but it has been shown through whole genome sequencing of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) Read More …
Before I get into the details of my project and share my results, I would first like to give a brief background on HTT. What is HTT? HTT is a protein that is encoded by HTT, the gene, and it stands for huntingtin. This protein is heavily implicated in Huntington’s disease (HD), a disease Read More …
Antibodies are fundamental tools in the exploration of cellular biology. Unfortunately, there is a lack of high-quality NSD3 antibodies available. To overcome this, I have generated a bicistronic NSD3-Short-3xFLAG – IRES – PuroR lentiviral expression plasmid for the purpose of creating cell lines that stably express 3xFLAG-tagged NSD3-short. This will allow me to use a Read More …
Our experiments use cells from patients with leukemia. These primary cells are notoriously difficult to culture, especially long term. To overcome this, we are using a co-culture system where we grow the leukemia cells with mouse stromal cells (OP9) to try to mimic some aspects of the bone marrow environment present in leukemia. Although essential Read More …
