This week, we have the pleasure of hosting Dr Arnaud Monteil from the CNRS Montpellier. Arnaud is an expert on many aspects of NALCN physiology and we look forward to having him around for a few days!

Unlike previous years, we left town only for a single day for our annual lab retreat – this time to the island of Hven. Awkwardly making our way across the island on tandem bikes, we learned about its illustrious history, incl its past as the former basis for Tycho Brahe’s astronomy studies and its current efforts to distill liquor with the help of music – go figure! Thanks to the team for a fun day out!

After a record-breaking 6 years in the Pless lab, Chow moved on to new adventures – for which we wish him all the very best! He deserves huge credit for helping to lift NALCN (and its auxiliary proteins) from relatively obscurity back into the ion channel limelight – and giving us plenty of work on (and things to think about) for the years to come. Thank you for your many contributions, you will be missed!

After various pandemic-related delays, it was finally time for the ion channel GRC in Mt Holyoke again. Sam and Stephan got treated to a fantastic line-up of speakers and Sam did a great job presenting his latest effort into identifying new interaction partners of the NALCN complex. Huge thanks to the organisers for a fun week full of channel magic!

Big congratulations to Gül and Sofie for passing their MSc thesis defense yesterday. They both did a fantastic job over the past 9 months learning about and working on split intein-mediated protein splicing on acid-sensing ion channels. They made a huge contribution to the project and we wish them all the best for the future!

We had a nice farewell breakfast for Debayan and Stephanie. Luckily, it is only a temporary ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ for Stephanie, as we can look forward to her returning after parental leave to continue her ASIC adventures! Debayan will move onto new endeavours elsewhere, for which we wish him all the best! We are very grateful for him deploying the split intein magic on an entire zoo of different channels for the past two years – and for always being a cheerful lab mate and dedicated supervisor!

Thanks to the efforts by Janne, Fadumo and Hendrik, the lab has now achieved the Bronze level certification status of the LEAF program. The programs aims at making laboratories (and the work in them) more sustainable and we hope to tackle Silver status next!

After 5 months as an exchange PhD student, it was time to say goodbye to Nadine – and thank her for astounding amount of NALCN patching she got done in this short time period! We wish her all the best for the remainder of her PhD and very much hope to see her again in the future!

Iacopo had been in the role of the resident (and later remote) Pless lab peptide magician since 2018 and will be missed on all levels! Thank you so much for all your amazing contributions to the many projects you were involved in and, most importantly, for enabling the intein magic around here in the first place! We miss you (and your pink shirts) already and wish you all the best for your new adventures!

After being postponed twice, the EMBO/FEBS lecture course on ion channels and transporters finally went ahead in the sleepy Sicilian hill town of Erice! Not everything was as expected (think thick fog, rain and wind instead of sunshine) or hoped for (participants with Visa issues and numerous Corona infections), but the food and science part delivered: delicious local bites and a fantastic lineup of didactic and science lectures, poster sessions and many informal discussions! Big thanks to all contributors, students, speakers and, especially, our sponsors and the local organisers!

One of the many 2022 events that got postponed numerous times, the Wallenberg symposium finally took place in Linköping, Sweden – Stephan was very honored to join the great speaker lineup (and visit friends and colleagues).