After doing his thesis work with us and finishing his MSc (equivalent) in Germany, we are delighted to welcome Hendrik Harms back as a PhD student. He will be working on atypical sodium channels and we very much look forward to having him around again!

Congrats to Debayan and Hendrik for leading the efforts on this book chapter on split-intein mediated engineering of ion channels. Big thanks also to Iacopo and Zeshan for helping to putt together this chapter, which will hopefully help others to implement this powerful approach. The chapter is online now HERE.

Registration is now open for the first ion channel symposium on ‘Novel members, structures and function’ – sign up for free here. The May 5th and 6th event will be fully online and feature an exciting line up of ion channel experts from around the globe.

Congrats to Zeshan for leading this big effort into the contributions of M1 and pre-M1 to ion selectivity in ASICs and ENaCs. The work features plenty of ephys (whole cell, single channel and high throughput), plus >80 conventional mutants, plus non-canonical amino acids and more – and can now be found on bioRxiv. This study would not have been possible without the other contributors and collaborators Matthias Wulf, Timothy Lynagh (now in Bergen, Norway), Mike Althaus (Bonn, Germany) and Søren Friis (Nanion Technologies)

We are delighted to welcome Mette and Katharina back to our team! Mette re-joins after maternity leave to continue her exciting work on protein-protein interactions and Katharina will conduct her MSc thesis work on NALCN – great to have you around (again)!

Today, we say hi to Marijana Oljica, who will be around as a laboratory technician intern for the next year – welcome and we look forward to having you around!

Alex was our latest lab tech intern and we are very grateful for all your help over the last (and slightly chaotic) year. Thanks and all the best for your next move(s).

We continue our (sad) string of farewells in early 2021 by saying goodbye to Zeshan. He had joined in 2016 as a PhD student and has since greatly helped us understand ion selectivity in ASICs and ENaCs. He has been immensely productive and he will be missed a lot! Thank you for everything and all the best for your next endeavours – we hope to still see you around occasionally!

Today, it was time to bid our (socially distanced) farewell to Nina. We are very sad to see her move on after having been around for the past  6 years – and having been instrumental in setting up much of the ncAA and ASIC efforts around the lab. Thank you so much for all your contributions in and around the lab – you will be missed a lot! Wishing you all the best for your next endeavour!

Our latest endeavour into protein semi-synthesis / MD combo is out on bioRxiv. Together with our fantastic collaborators from the Lucie Delemotte lab, we show how Nav1.5 patient mutations can be functionally benign – until they get phosphorylated and then wreak havoc on inactivation. Great job by Iacopo and Hendrik putting this together and we are grateful for support by DFF and the Lundbeck Foundation.