Our latest endeavours into protein engineering show that ASICs are exquisitely sensitive to side chain length and charge at a conserved Lys in the extracellular domain – one carbon can make all the difference! Big thanks to postdocs former postdocs Debayan Sarkar and Iacopo Galleano for leading this effort, assisted by former MSc students Sofie Ou and Gül Uzun, as well as the contributions by lab alumnus Keith Khoo and Gerbrand J.v.d.H. van Noort from Leiden (Netherlands)! We are very grateful for funding by the Lundbeck Foundation and the DFF. The current version of the manuscript can be found HERE.
The 2023 CBP retreat evolved around “Presentation, publication and innovation” and included a very interesting tour of the old downtown campus – big thanks to all those who participated and helped organise!
We are very grateful for a Lundbeck Foundation Collaborative Project grant. This will enable us to study and target the sodium leak channelosome together with the group of Prof Mei Zhen in Toronto over the next five years.
2022 was an exciting year, with lots of progress in the lab, new faces, sad goodbyes, finally some conferences again and plenty of ideas to keep us occupied for the year(s) to come. Big thanks to all the many contributors and their ceaseless efforts to keep the lab running (and make it more green!), as well as their curiosity and perseverance to push our projects forward!
Congratulations to Claudia for successfully defending her PhD thesis! Her work focused on studying the effects of disease-causing mutations in the NALCN channelosome and contributed to classifying them according to the type of mutation. We wish her all the best for her future and also thank her thesis assessment committee, Hanne Poulsen, Arnaud Monteil and Petrine Wellendorph
After a long Covid-related delay, the ‘Chemistry and Biology of Peptides’ GRC finally went ahead in Ventura, California. Big kudos to the organizers for putting together an exciting and diverse program covered a staggering array of peptide science – a big honor for the lab to be able to showcase some of our intein magic!
Stephan had the honor of presenting some of our ASIC work at the second “Doing biology with light” meeting on Tenerife. Big thanks to Drs Teresa Giraldez and Andrew Plested for putting together a very inspiring meeting in a spectacular place. Fingers crossed the third iteration of “Doing biology with light” is not too far off!
After a tight race with the Olsen group, we crossed the finish line simultaneously, when both groups were awarded the LEAF silver certificate this morning. A big thanks to everyone involved – an exciting step towards more sustainability (and less spending)!
Today, we had the pleasure of saying hi to Keith, who pioneered the split intein work in the Pless lab and who now works in Australia. Thanks so much for swinging by, Keith – it was great catching up with you and enjoy Down Under!
The Europhysiology 2022 meeting brought an abundance of physiology experts to town, including some interested in ion channels. This presented a great opportunity to showcase some of our recent efforts to incorporate non-canonical amino acids and post-translational modifications into Nav1.5 and NALCN, presented by Hendrik and Nadine, respectively. It also provided a welcome opportunity to catch up with collaborators and friends!
