Well done Aisha Ameen, who successfully defended her MSc thesis today! Aisha helped us decipher the function of a whole range of NALCN patient mutations. We will miss having a native English (British!) speaker around and we’re wishing her all the best for her next endeavours!

Congrats to MSc student Johann Sigurdsson for successfully defending his thesis yesterday. Big thanks for helping us understand some of the effects of protein-protein interactions on ASICs – and all the best for your future!

Congrats to Zeshan for successfully defending his PhD thesis today. Over the past 3 years, he made huge contributions to our attempts to decipher ion selectivity in ASICs and ENaCs. He then demonstrated strong nerves when having to write up and defend during a pandemic – well done!

Big thanks also to the assessment committee, consisting of Drs Palmer, Premdjee and Kristensen.

Congrats to our MSc student Peilin Tu for successfully defending her thesis today. She helped us understand how Nalcn is modulated by auxiliary proteins. Well done and best of luck with your future endeavours!

This year, our annual lab retreat took us to Sjællands Odde, where we were hosted in Janne’s beautiful summer house. Big thanks to everyone for contributing to our lively discussions on stress(relief), reproducibility, research integrity and minimizing waste around lab. Fingers crossed we can do our next retreat without face masks.

Debayan Sarkar finally made it to Denmark today after a (multiple month) long delay due to the COVID-19 situation. He joins us from India, where he conducted a very successful PhD working on (mostly) peptide modulation of TRPV1 channels – welcome and we look forward to having you around!

Today, we welcomed Katharina Schott to our team. She joins us from the University of Vienna for a internship this fall, followed by her MSc thesis work in 2021 – we look forward to having her around!

Great collaboration with the Ciferri and Payandeh groups out in Nature now: Structure of the human sodium leak channel NALCN/FAM155A complex.

The work explains how a) FAM155A forms a dome-like structure above the pore to determine the notorious NALCN pharmacology, b) structurally unique voltage-sensing domains mediate the odd voltage-sensitivity and c) disease-causing mutations cluster around the pore module to affect channel function.

Congratulations to the teams on both sides! Especially excited for Marc, Chow, Cameron and Claudia, who lead our efforts on structure and function! Big thanks to the amazing (and tireless) Jian, as well as our local undergrad students Aisha and Oskar for their contributions.

My group is hugely grateful to the Carlsberg Foundation, DFF and Lundbeck Foundation for their continued support since the early stages of this exciting project.

We are very grateful to Anna Ulstein Odland (UCPH, DK), Eva Kaulich (MRC, UK) and Valeria Kalienkova (Univ Groningen, NL) for agreeing speak at our recent virtual lab meetings! Great to hear about their exciting science – and a fantastic opportunity for us to learn more animal models, funky channels and cryo-EM!