December 2014

The Holiday Season is upon us and everyone is deserving a good rest. Some people are travel far, other stay close to home. The Christmas party was fun, more full-size pictures can be found at the datashare site.

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August 2014

Dr. Alla Gagariniva joined the lab this month. She obtained PhD degree at the University of Toronto in the area of proteomics. She will be leading our efforts in identification of effectors targets in the host cells using mass spectrometry.

May 2014

Two new people joined the lab this month. Dr. Lei Li has expertise in cell biology and will use his skills to identify new cellular targets for bacterial effector proteins. Mr. Ben Flath joined the lab as a Research Assistant and will be engaged in ongoing research together with other lab members.

March 2014

The new BRUKER X-ray area deterctor system for protein crystallography has been installed in 3D40 lab. The X-ray source is a micro-focus sealed tube running at 50 W and the detector is based on CMOS technology. With this fast readout detector with very short deadtime it is possible to collect diffraction data in the shatter-less mode. The crystal is cooled to temperature as low as 100K with the Oxford Cryostsems Cobra cooling system.

February 2014

Karin van Straaten joined the lab as a Research Associate.

January 2014

The paper describing the structrure of the N-terminal domain of LegC3 effector from Legionella pneumophila has been published in Acta Cryst D.

December 2013

Usha Nair finished her contract and left the lab et the end of the month. We wish her well with her future endeavors.

Paper on the interactions of the transcriptional regulator DhaR of the Dihydroxyacetone (Dha) kinase with the components of Dha kinases has been accepted in STRUCTURE.

Paper describing our results on NleH1 and NleH2 bacterial effector kinases has been published in STRCTURE.

November 2013

Ksenia Beyrakhova joined the lab as a post-doctoral fellow. She obtained her PhD at the Moscow University.

Paper describing the structure of the Noterminal domain of LegC3 effector from Legionella pneumophila was accepted in Acta Crystallogr. D.

September 2013

Ivy Chung joined our lab as a post-doctoral fellow. She came from Simon Fraser University.

Kevin Voth started as a graduate student.

June 2013

15-16 June, First annual PRISM meeting antitled "Protein Structure, Function and Malfunction"

The PCCF is operational. The DLS plate reader, CD spectrometer and ITC instrument have been installed and are already in use.

Kevin Voth joined the lab as a summer student.

May 2013

Sergei and Maia improved the crystal of membrane protein and obtained 7A resolution. The structure could be solved by molecular replacement.

Michal supervised installation of BIOMEK FX liquid handling robot and circular dichroism spectrometer. Both are now operational

April 2013

Centre for Proteomics Research in Interactions and Structure of Macromolecules (PRISM) approved by the University Council on 18 April

On 23 April we have moved to the new lab space in D-wing !!!

GRYPHON crystallization robot operational again

ITC instrument installed.

March 2013

Structure of the first effector-host protein complex determined by Andrey.

January 2013

Anita Agblor joined the lab as a Research Assistant.

Structure of the new effector determined by Andrey.

September 2012

Deqiang solved our first crystal structure at U of S. This is an effector protein from Legionella.

Andrey crystallized another Legionella effector and together with Deqiang they solved its structure.

Dr. Michal Boniecki joined the lab from the University of Champlain-Urbana.

Two graduate students, Thirumalai and Caishuang, joined the lab this summer.