Ellie Williams

I’ve got a few things to catch up with on the blog – one of them is to talk about a conference I attended in Oxford recently. I attended the Biochemical Society BMP Signalling in Cancer II meeting which was held in St. Annes College, Oxford. At this meeting I presented a poster on the Read More …

In this post I’d like to return to looking at my work on phosphorylation. Phosphorylation is a key signalling method for activating the BMP pathway and inducing activity. Specifically activation of ALK2 by phosphorylation leads to phosphorylation of SMAD1 which leads to gene transcription that ultimately is responsible for bone formation. In this post I’m Read More …

ZFYVE9C (Otherwise known as SARA) is a scaffold protein involved in the association of various protein components as part of the TGFB signalling pathway. The equivalent in the BMP signalling pathway is a protein known as Endofin so studying SARA (which is slightly easier) might give us useful insights for both proteins. For more details Read More …

I thought I’d spend a blog post just talking about the various paths of my research and try and tie it all together. A lot of my experiments do dot around these various arms of investigation and so one experimental post doesn’t necessarily tie in directly with the previous one or the next one and Read More …

One problem with working with the isolated kinase domains of ALK2 and it’s type II binding partners, is that the affinity between the kinase domains alone is insufficient to allow complex formation. We know that the two proteins associate with each other in vivo and are co-localised by the domains on the outside of the Read More …

This week one of the things I’ve been working on is the final set of mutations in the GS domain of Alk2 to help us unpick the influence of phosphorylation on function. That, however, is a bit of a mouthful so let’s unpack it a bit. I said in my last blog post that we Read More …

One of the questions to be asked when looking at the mutation in ALK2 that causes FOP, is how exactly does that mutation cause the disease. ALK2 we know is part of the BMP signalling pathway responsible for bone formation and the mutation results in excess bone formation – thus we can summarise that somehow Read More …

Having previously purified BMPR1A (Alk3) and BMPR1B (Alk6), I spent some time purifying FKBP12 to form complexes with each of the receptors. FKBP12 binds to BMPR1A and BMPR1B via a similar GS domain to that seen in ACVR1, on the N-terminal side of the kinase domain and may help stabilize the structures and thus help Read More …

I had a couple of weeks off over August but I was back last week ready to crack on with work. As you’ve probably been following the ongoing saga, Ros and I have been struggling with expression of our key constructs. She had some good news on that on her latest post which has some Read More …