Pull down of XIAP with type I & II receptors. Tm shifts of M4K Pharma compounds with Alk2, Alk5 and RIPK2.

XIAP and its interaction with type I and type II receptors. Having spent time over the past few weeks purifying all the components needed for a pull down with XIAP, I did the experiment that looked for interactions between XIAP and various type I and type II receptors in both the un-phosphorylated and phosphorylated form. Read More …

Synthesis of BRSK2 Compounds

BRSK2 Compounds NRF2 is a transcription factor that regulates the expression of antioxidant proteins and functions to protect against oxidative stress caused by inflammation. Under normal physiological conditions, NRF2 is degraded by KEAP1 and Cullin 3 (CUL3) through a process called ubiquitination (ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis). Following ubiquitination, it is transported to the proteasome where it is Read More …

A bad day in the lab – science never goes as expected!

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 …

Various purifications, and a few crystal hits

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 …

Overexpression of Expanded HTT in Brain Cancer Cell Lines

The experimental set-up and results covered in this post can be found here: 10.5281/zenodo.1292884. A few posts back, I tried expressing HTT with different lengths of Q repeats in mammalian cells using baculovirus (read more here). However, expression was not very good, especially for HTT with longer Q repeats (have a look at these results here). Read More …

Optimising an assay to detect alkaline phosphatase activity in C2C12 cells

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 …