Congratulations to our fabulous postdoc, John, for being appointed to the competitive Vanderbilt Functional Neurogenomics training grant. We look forward to his exciting plans and studies to be focused on adaptor protein complexes. 

Congratulations to John, Carli, and our collaborators for a new paper out in the Cellular Dynamics special issue of Protein Science. It was fun to learn some new approaches to thinking about AP-4 structure in tandem with evolutionary and disease data.

​Check out the paper here

Congratulations to Amy and all co-authors for a beautiful cover at Structure. Check out final published version here and the cover image here. Thanks to the Munson lab (UMass Medical School) for writing a Preview article featuring our structures!

Check it out at: ​https://www.cell.com/structure/fulltext/S0969-2126(20)30009-5

Congratulations to Amy, Betty, and all of our fantastic collaborators. Our first single particle cryoEM structure paper was accepted at Structure. Proud of the lab for taking the plunge (terrible pun!) into a new area of structural biology. We look forward to many more single particle structures!

In December, Lauren won the Nordhaus award for excellence in undergraduate teaching based on her contributions to Biochemistry. It was a wonderful surprise to end the year! Check it out here: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/news/2019/12/10/2019-faculty-awards/

You can read more about history of the award here:
https://as.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/awards.php

We are delighted to welcome a new undergraduate, Melissa,  to the lab this semester. Melissa is an MCB major on the pre-med track who is broadly interested in trafficking proteins and how pathogens attack cells. 

We are delighted to welcome rotation students for the 2019-20 academic year. The lab is a great place to train. We have an awesome and experienced lab manager, two excellent postdocs, and two talented senior graduate students to support you. Check out our membrane trafficking interests on the website, and look through project possibilities below. 

If you’re interested, please email your resume/CV and background details (science courses, research experience) to Lauren. We’ll then set up a time to meet and discuss your interests. We look forward to hearing from you!

1. Protein expression & purification from bacteria & mammalian cells
2. Protein-protein interactions by pulldown assays & calorimetry
3. Crystallization & X-ray crystallographry
4. Negative stain & single particle cryo-EM
5. Tissue culture: transfection, IP, knockdown, rescue experiments
6. Imaging & image analysis (with Data Science Institute) 

Lauren will give a talk on retromer single particle cryoEM structures this summer at the GRC Molecular Membrane Biology meeting in July. Excited for this opportunity to share new work with the trafficking community.