We are very grateful to the Lundbeck Foundation for an Ascending Investigator grant that will support our work on ASICs for the next four years. We are excited to get this project started!

Congratulations to Sarune for successfully defending her MSc thesis today. Over the past 12 months, Sarune did a great job advancing some of our work on P2X2 receptors, as well as some intein-based protein engineering. Well done and all the best for your future – you will be missed!

In a collaborative effort with our colleagues at Temple University, Philadelphia, US, we have looked at evolutionary conserved interactions within the pore domain of ASICs. While Marina Kasimova, Daniele Granata and Enzo Carnevale covered the computational work in Philadelphia, Timothy Lynagh (now in Bergen), Zeshan Sheikh and Christian Borg handled the experimental part in Copenhagen. The work is now online at Biophysical Journal – congrats to everyone involved!

As we say goodbye to last years MSc students, we say hi to our new lab members: MSc students Aisha Ameen, Asli Topaktas, Johann Sigurdsson and Peilin Tu, as well as scholar student Oskar Bahlke. Welcome and we look forward to having you around!

Along with the rest of the Center for Biopharmaceuticals, members of the Pless lab took part in the annual DHL relay – well everyone for surviving a busy 5 (or 10, for some) kilometers through the busy, smoke-filled running maze through Fælledparken.

Congrats to Jamie for successfully defending his MSc thesis. Jamie spent a year with us working on a tricky receptor, together with his supervisor Mette. Big thanks to both for making a lot of headway on an exciting project and we wish Jamie all the best for the future.

This year, we were lucky enough to be able to go on our annual group retreat to Gothenburg, Sweden. Here, we spent a few days filled with science and explorations of the local coastline – thanks to everyone for making it a fun outing!

Huge thanks to postdoc Chow and the rest of the NALCN team for their epic efforts to put this manuscript together. We demonstrate how the elusive sodium leak channel requires the presence of three other neuronal proteins to be robustly expressed in heterologous systems. We then go on to show that its constitutive activity is modulated by both voltage and extracellular divalent cations, in particular calcium. All the details to be found on here. We are very grateful for the support from the Danish Research Council, the Carlsberg Foundation and the Lundbeck Foundation.

After over a year in the lab, it was Yasmin´s turn to defend her MSc thesis. She had been working hard to support our efforts to delineate the binding site of a neuropeptide on ASIC1a and did very well defending her thesis work. Yasmin has been an absolute pleasure to have around and we will miss her going forward!

Well done, Zeshan, for securing a grant from the Augustinus Foundation! The funding will support his 3-month stay abroad at the University of Newcastle, UK.