A growing team of groundbreaking scientists around the world are now sharing their lab notebooks online
A large number of ACVR1/ALK2 inhibitors were previously synthesised by Paul Brenner’s team (Target Discovery Center, University of Oxford) for the purpose of treating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP). Although these compounds were not designed with blood-brain-barrier permeability in mind, they can serve as good bench-marks for my cellular assays. Therefore, 30 of these legacy compounds Read More …
Dear readers, I had unfortunately torn my ACL for the silliest of reasons and have decided to use up my annual leaves for more time off. I will therefore be on hiatus till October. Adios! Jong Fu
Every summer my department holds a special mini-conference for the DPhil (aka PhD) students so that we can get to know each other and practice presenting our research. This year I took along a poster outlining my own project – Understanding the pathogenic mechanism of ACVR1 mutations in Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma – and presented Read More …
As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, our workhorse ACVR1 constructs have, for mysterious reasons, stopped expressing. This is clearly a massive problem, as with no protein we can not progress the project, and in the meantime, another DIPG patient has died, Aubreigh Nicholas, the 11-year-old girl who started the lemon face challenge. This is tragic, Read More …
In the absence of our “workhorse” protein, ACVR1 residues 208-499 (constitutively active Q207D mutant) (as we are still trying to work out why it won’t express at the moment), and the complete lack of crystals/diffracting crystals for the TGFBR1/FKBP12 complex, I have shifted to some other constructs we have to keep things moving. I had Read More …
I’m sad to report that a couple of test expressions later, we’re still no wiser as to why ACVR1 isn’t expressing. It’s worked on a couple of small scale expression test plates, but just doesn’t want to scale up anymore. We may be looking at having to remake the virus. In the meantime, I had Read More …
I ended last time saying Shubhash had saved the day by finding a better virus stock and growing up some more cells for me. Sadly, this did not work – still no expression. So we tried halving the amount of virus used, as using too much can infect too many cells leaving not enough making Read More …
A large number of ACVR1/ALK2 inhibitors were previously synthesised by Paul Brenner’s team (Target Discovery Center, University of Oxford) for the purpose of treating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP). Although these compounds were not designed with blood-brain-barrier permeability in mind, they can serve as good bench-marks for my cellular assays. Therefore, 30 of these legacy compounds Read More …
The EC50 of Tracer-6908 with ACVR1-c-nanoLuc and ideal conditions for the target engagement assay have been determined in a previous experiment. However, it is still necessary to verify that the IC50 values determined in the assay are closed enough approximation to the actual IC50 values of the compounds. If the IC50 values are strongly influenced Read More …
I promised to post again today with an update on in-house screening of my hit for fragment screening, but sadly, there’s nothing to update, as yesterday turned into a litany of disappointment (not to be too much of a drama queen!). First, I started a fresh purification of ACVR1 to prepare for setting up new Read More …
