Stephan was invited to speak at the fantastic 9th edition of the Chemical Protein Synthesis meeting in Nagoya, Japan. The conference featured the latest and greatest on how to make proteins from scratch and provided a great platform to present our protein semisynthesis work – big thanks to the organisers for including our ion channel work!
Emanuel Rodriguez from the Simmons group at the Charité Berlin will be joining us for a couple of weeks to work on a potential functional coupling between different kinds of ion channels as part of his PhD. Welcome on board!
Led by former postdoc Chow (now group leader in Sydney), the work was just published in PNAS. The study was started by former MSc student Katharina, and later expanded by contributions from Sam and our collaborators in the Carnevale lab. It outlines that the lateral fenestrations do indeed block access to a hidden drug binding site with the NALCN pore module and reveals a potentially promising pharmacophore to pharmacologically target NALCN in the future. Congrats to everyone involved!
Big congratulations to Hendrik for successfully obtaining his PhD! Hendrik did a great job defending his thesis work on the regulation of NALCN by G proteins in front of his assessors (and membrane protein experts) Profs Henry Colecraft (Columbia University, USA) and Poul Nissen (Aarhus, DK) and committee chair Céline Galvagnion-Büll (ILF). Very well done and we look forward to having you around for a little longer!
10 years after its inception in 2014, we got a chance to catch with former and current members of the CBP. This involved a small symposium, followed by a reception and it was great to see so many show up from all over Europe. Big thanks to Federica for the idea and to Iacopo and Christian for helping to make it happen!
Today, Laura Hellriegel joined us for an 8-week internship. She will be joining Emma in her efforts to work on inhibition of NALCN – welcome and we look forward to having you around!
Stephan had the pleasure of being invited to speak at Washington University St Louis, a place like no other when it comes to density of ion channel geeks – big thanks to host Baron Chanda for organising a fantastic visit. On the way there and back, the trip also afforded the possibility to catch up with collaborators in New York, making for a very exciting trip!
Congratulations to Caroline, Asli and Johs for having completed this epic fluorometry effort under Stephanie’s guidance. The project started a few years back and, after the obligatory twists and turns, resulted in some really neat insight on the conformational landscape of ASICs under different desensitising conditions. Big thanks to everyone involved!
Hendrik ventured to Ventura, California to participate in the GRC on ‘Ligand recognition and molecular gating’. In fact, he was invited to give a talk at the preceding GRS on his work on G protein regulation of the NALCN channelosome . Thanks to organisers including our work in the program!
Congrats to Stephanie for being selected for an oral presentation at BPS 2024 to talk about some of her recent ASIC work using VCF and split inteins. And big thanks for representing the lab in Philly in the first place!
