We have the pleasure of welcoming our new lab tech intern, Camilla Lindskog, to the team. We look forward to having you around!

Nadine, Laurie, Hendrik and Stephan ventured far into the Swiss mountains to attend the first-ever Worldwide Sodium Channel Conference in beautiful Grindelwald. Big thanks to the whole organising team for putting together an interesting program – and letting us present some of our Nav1.5 and NALCN work!

After bringing on board external collaborators for some simulations, and Sam for additional mutant characterisation, Chow put together the updated version of the NALCN pharmacology work started by Katharina. You can read the latest version HERE.

The 2024 CBP retreat was all about how artificial intelligence and machine learning impacts biomedical research, learning and teaching. Big thanks to the many contributors for putting together an educational and inspiring program!

In an attempt to improve sustainability and efficiency of our lab and those of some of our CBP neighbours, Hendrik put to together a productive full-day program. A bunch of overhauled protocols and procedures and literally thousands of discarded samples later, we are hopefully a step closer attaining LEAF Gold status. Big thanks to everyone involved!

Thanks to Emma, Sam and Stephanie for organising the 2024 Pless lab retreat to Ystad in Sweden. We were treated to snow, sunshine, freezing temperatures, fun games and a fruitful group review – bring on the new year!

Congratulations to Stephanie, along with the students trained by her on this project (Asli, Johs and Caroline), for leading this intriguing VCF study on ASICs. Using many beautiful VCF recordings they provide insight into how the ASIC1a ECD moves under different desensitizing conditions. Read the whole story on bioRxiv.

The manuscript on our protein engineering efforts with ASIC1a is now published in Cell Chemical Biology. The work represents a nice example of how protein engineering, electrophysiology and computational approaches can be combined to provide atomic-scale insight into ion channel function. Big thanks to all authors and to our funding sources Lundbeck Foundation and DFF. 

We are very grateful for having received equipment grants from the Hartmann Foundation (Nadine received co-funding for a patch-clamp setup) and the Carlsberg Foundation (Joe Rogers spearheaded an application for a peptide analyzer).

After years of delay (thank you, Corona), Stephan finally got to visit the NIH and Yale. Despite a very dense itinerary, this turned out to be a very inspiring trip with lots of input and interesting discusssions. Big thanks to the hosts Kenton Swartz and Ana Fernandez-Marino (NIH) and Jean-Ju Chung (Yale) for organising two fantastic visits!