The Wallace Group has recently received a 3-year grant from the Rosetrees
Trust for work on: ‘“Seeing” General Anaesthetics Bound to Sodium
Channels: Using Novel Structure/Function Information for Molecular
Understanding and Design, Enabling Improved Function and Safety’ – a
collaboration with Professor Hugh Hemmings’ Lab at the Weill Cornell Medical
Centre in New York.
ISMB Postgraduate ‘Lockdown’ Symposium
A one day Symposium celebrating the research of the ISMB’s current postgraduate students will take place on Monday 15 June 2020.
Full details are available here.
Professor Steven Perkins (Professor of Structural Biochemistry, UCL) made the front cover of October’s Biochemical Journal (vol. 476, issue 19) with his latest paper:
A joint project with UCL Medicine and the University of Bedfordshire, it is a combination of work done on Professor Perkins’ new analytical ultracentrifuge, protein crystallography and recombinant proteins.
Citation: Lau, A. M., Zahid, H., Gor, J., Perkins, S. J., Coker, A. R. & McDermott, L. C. (2019) Crystal structure of zinc-α2-glycoprotein in complex with a fatty acid reveals multiple different modes of lipid binding. Biochem. J. 476, 2815-2834.
Dr Giulia Zanetti’s research group has been awarded two new grants.
A European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant was awarded for a project which shows how coat assembly can deliver the flexibility necessary to accommodate a wide variety of cargo proteins, and how the process can be regulated. Her focus is on COPII coat, which mediates export from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) of about a third of newly synthesized proteins. The aim of the project is to understand the molecular interactions between coat components and understand their role in determination of coat architecture and membrane shape.
Full details are available here.
A Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) grant was awarded for another project whose overall objective is to dissect the molecular mechanisms involved in COPII coat budding, and in particular to assess the dynamic regulation of the various levels of coat assembly and its role in flexible membrane remodelling.
Further details of Dr Zanetti’s research can be found on her lab website.
Patterns in Protein Sequence and Structure (Reloaded)
This research symposium will be held at Birkbeck in honour of Willie Talyor on 20th September 2019, celebrating 40 years of his pioneering research in computational biology.
This symposium will bring together past and current collaborators and scientists inspired by Willie Taylor’s research. For those wondering about the title, this symposium also marks 30 years since the landmark conference of the same name was held at EMBL in Heidelberg, which in many respects marked the start of the modern bioinformatics era. Willie was one of the organisers of that meeting, and a number of the speakers from that conference will also be speaking in this symposium.
Full details and tickets are available here.
New research led by Birkbeck’s Professor Sanjib Bhakta and Professor Ester Boix from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona offers new hope in the fight against bacterial infections and the rise of antimicrobial drug resistance in tuberculosis (TB), a devastating infectious disease which presents a major global health challenge.
See the full press release here.
On a sunny day in June, just before the summer solstice, staff from the ISMB at UCL and Birkbeck had their (now) annual retreat this year at the London Zoo. In our busy lives as academics, these away-days provide us with the rare opportunity to catch up with our colleagues from across Torrington Place in a relaxed atmosphere and to make new friends!
We met at the Terrace Restaurant in the ‘Outback’, where we kick-started the day with tea and coffee, surrounded by emus and wallabies. Tabitha had expertly prepared maps that indicated our exploratory trail through the Zoo, incorporating show-and-tell and feeding times for maximum knowledge gathering and entertainment. Watching dragons, flightless birds, pigs and monkeys with moustaches and coatis – which is not pronounced like the garment (I learned that day), but rather co-ah-ti, gave people plenty to discuss over a very nice BBQ-style lunch back at the restaurant. We then had time to continue our short trip round the zoo to catch up with some more amazing animals before listening to the two science presentations by Drs Alexa Varah and Nathalie Petorelli from the Institute of Zoology about ‘The costs of herbicide resistance in UK agriculture’ and ‘Satellite remote sensing – a conservation revolution’. Despite the fact that our research at the ISMB is somewhat remote from these topics, there was great interest from the audience and lively discussions ensued. It was a brilliant day out, and I’m looking much forward to the retreat in 2020.
Tine Arnvig, UCL-ISMB
Flightless birds
Monkey with moustache
Men in blue
See-through butterfly
A paper by Professor Neil McDonald’s research group, in collaboration with Sir Richard Treisman, has been published in Nature Cell Biology, identifying a new RPEL-family of rhoGAPs that link Rac/Cdc42 GTP loading to G-actin availability.
The paper is available here.
Professor Bart Hoogenboom’s research group published a paper titled ‘Quantification of Biomolecular Dynamics inside Real and Synthetic Nuclear Pore Complexes using Time-Resolved Atomic Force Microscopy’ in ACS Nano in June 2019.
The full paper is available here.