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Gosh, it’s been a while since I posted – not because I have nothing to report, but because I’ve been super busy in the lab trying to get things done, as well as having loads of meetings and a symposium. So, in the meantime, I’ve done two purifications of ACVR1 and set up crystal plates, Read More …
I don’t just want to check whether the compounds I’m testing kill DIPG cells, I want to check that they’re doing this by altering BMP signalling too. However, I can’t do this with the DIPG cells, because if a compound does work, and kill them, there’ll be no cell left to actually measure the amount Read More …
In nanoBRET assay, a fluorescently labelled tracer binds to the ATP-binding pocket of ACVR1/ALK2. This binding brings the tracer into the proximity (<10nm) of Nano-Luciferase which is fused to the C-terminus of ACVR1/ALK2. Bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) occurs where the energy released by Nano-Luciferase is transferred to the fluorophore via intermolecular forces. Nano-Luciferase and Read More …
As you are probably aware by now, if you’ve read a few of my blogs, we are testing ATP competitive inhibitors to inhibit ALK2 but not any of the other 6 ALK family members. Thus, most of our activity and cellular assays test ALK2 as well as ALK5 activity in order to check the specificity Read More …
Hello there! This week I won’t be filling you in on my latest experiment, because instead I spent three days at the first ever Cancer Research UK Brain Tumour Conference held in the Royal Society of Medicine in London! (Also the biggest conference I’ve been to so far). The conference gathered over 30 great speakers Read More …
It’s been a little while since I posted. I’ve been really busy, but haven’t had that much to report. I’ve been doing some processing of the fragment screening data we have so far. We found one possible hit in the pocket we are looking at for allosteric ligands, which initially looked very exciting, but on Read More …
It’s usually a good idea to have more than one trick up your sleeve… So with that in mind, I’ve started developing another viability assay for my DIPG cell lines. The first assay relied on convincing a cell line that naturally grows as floating spheres to grow stuck down on the bottom of plastic wells, Read More …
I was away on leave last week, but happily, before I left, I set up 25 crystal plates of ACVR1 with various compounds. The details of the protein purification, the compounds used and some of the crystals obtained are here, on Zenodo. So I was able to at least come back to something after my Read More …
Over the past few weeks I’ve been perfecting a method for screening a small set of therapeutic compounds on DIPG cell lines. Before starting I made sure to discuss the techniques used in other groups to make sure that I design an assay that is comparable to theirs, although I may make my own changes Read More …
I’ve put the Molprobity stats for the model I have refined to run my fragment screening datasets against in Zenodo. It looks pretty good, and I was happy when the parameters finally all went into the green. I have about 90 datasets with resolution lower than 2.6 Å, so hopefully I’ll get at least one Read More …
