Congrats to postdoc Stephanie for being awarded an infrastructure grant from the Carlsberg Foundation. The grant will support her efforts into understanding how neuropeptides modulate ASICs – read further details HERE.

After a productive 5 years in the Pless, we are very sad to see Christian move on. He has been instrumental in many of our ASIC-related projects, especially those involving neuropeptides and toxins – and will be missed tremendously by us all! Thanks for being a great lab members and all the best for whatever awaits you on the other side of your 4 month-daycare career!

Congrats to Nina for getting her primary PhD project out on bioRxiv! She established a way to record from ncAA-containing ASICs on an automated patch-clamp (APC) device – and used the approach to dig into the details of the function and pharmacology of up to 309 ASIC variants. Huge thanks to our collaborators: Jacob Andersen for getting this off the ground, Søren Friis from Nanion for lending us his APC expertise and the Team of Andrea Sinz in Halle for their help with mass spectrometry!

We are immensely grateful for the Novo Nordisk Foundation to support our latest endeavours into the world of atypical sodium channels. We very much look forward to getting this new project off the ground in 2021 – stay tuned!

Chow was invited to present some of our recent data on the function and structure of NALCN at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

After years of work, this collaboration on peptide inhibitors of the alpha-cobratoxin-nAChR alpha7 interaction is finally out. Big thanks to everyone involved, especially to Brian Lohse for initiating it all, our lab neighbours Christian Olsen and Bengt Gless for affinity measurements, the Daniel Kümmel group for structural work – and the tireless Tim Lynagh for pretty much everything else! Read the full story in J Med Chem now.

Claudia Weidling got to talk to our collaborators at Nanion Technologies about electrophysiology in general and her recent work on NALCN in particular. Listen to the podcast HERE.

Big thanks to Manu Ben-Johny for putting together a great (virtual) seminar visit at the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia. Huge pleasure to meet the amazing faculty and present some of our latest work!

Big thanks to our four MSc students this year: Aisha Ameen, Asli Topaktas, Johann Sigurdsson and Peilin Tu. Well done on finishing your projects and we will you all the best for the future. Special thanks also to their lab supervisors for all their support and dedication in helping these four grow!

Congrats to Asli Topaktas for successfully defending her MSc thesis today. She was the fourth and last MSc student to finish this year and she has helped us decipher some of the details of how ASICs are modulated by toxins and neuropeptides – thanks and all the best for the future!