A growing team of groundbreaking scientists around the world are now sharing their lab notebooks online
In this post, I would like to share my recent work on HAO1 fragment screening by crystallography, as a means to identify inhibitor starting points. So why fragment screening by x-ray crystallography? Well there are two components to my method of choice: Fragments instead of complex compounds provide good starting chemistry Fragments are less than Read More …
Hello everybody! I am Sabrina, a third year DPhil student in Wyatt Yue’s lab at the SGC University of Oxford, co-supervised by Paul Brennan. I am fascinated by how a single base change in an enzyme-coding gene can lead to a diverse group of symptoms and how the severity of such diseases can be reduced Read More …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Post-doctoral position for an ‘Omic-oriented’ parasitologist/bioinformatician in Montpellier University, France Update April 2019: If you are skilled and motivated, this position is still open! Drop me an email (see address at the bottom) Summary: – Up to 3 years post-doc position in genomics and transcriptomics data analysis of the Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasite. – Read More …
The inter-domain conformational mobility of UGGT, the eukaryotic secretion glycoprotein folding checkpoint, is likely key to its ability of recognising and re-glucosylating a vast number of different misfolded glycoproteins, bearing N-linked glycan(s) at various different distances from the site(s) of misfold. Ongoing Molecular Dynamics simulations by Juan Blanco, Carlos Modenutti, and Marcelo Martí in Buenos Read More …
There are two major NSD3 isoforms expressed, long (aa 1-1437) and short (aa 1-645, differing in sequence from 620-645). The short isoform lacks a methyltransferase domain and, perhaps surprisingly, is the form attributed to NSD3’s role in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) [1]. I’ve previously used the TCGA-LUSC data-set [2] to test for differential expression based on the 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 …
Expression and purification of the HTT-HAP40 complex with expanded polyQ (Q54)
