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.

We are delighted that Olivia Pembridge has joined as a research technician this summer. Olivia is working with our departmental colleague, Dr. Thomas Clements, to knock out trafficking genes in zebrafish using CRISPR technology. We are extremely excited about this new angle to our research.

We are thrilled our two undergraduate researchers are off having fantastic summer experiences. Congratulations Carli and Chris for these great opportunities.

Carli Needle has joined Shawn Burgess's lab at the National Human Genome Research Institute through the NIH summer internship program. She will work on modeling human genetic diseases in zebrafish using targeted gene knockout approaches.

Chris Jung was accepted into Dr. Annette Beck-Sickinger's lab at Leipzig University via an international research program sponsored by the Max Kade Center for European & German studies. He will work on investigating allosteric modulation of the human Y4 receptor.

We are excited to announce our first cryo-EM structures as our first posted paper on bioRxiv. This was a heroic effort, especially by lab manager extraordinaire, Amy Kendall.

We'd love to hear your feedback while we await formal peer review.

Check it out at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/639575v1

Delighted that Dr. Mintu Chandra has joined us from Brett Collins's lab at the IMB (Univ of Queensland). Mintu just published a paper characterizing human PX domain proteins and was awarded a Pearson Fellowship from the Vanderbilt Biochemistry Department. Delighted to have you!

Check out the paper at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30948714