Distilled Papers

The lab welcomes Maureen who jobs the group as a research technician to work on GCN2 in mesothelioma cells, funded by Asthma + Lung UK.

Thank you to everybody who helped and made the journey up to Dundee for a very successful meeting! Special thanks to our two guest speakers Stephan Rauschenbach and Sarah Maslen, the co-organisers Joe, Aneika, and Anton, and Ulrik from Thermo for help with the demos!

The Lab looks forward to hosting the British Mass Spectrometry Society’s Biomacromolecular Structure Structural Interest Group on October 24th and 25th! A workshop and conference will highlight the latest advances in instrumentation and data analysis in the field, alongside chances to network. Last chance to register: https://www.bmss.org.uk/bmss-biomacromolecular-structure-sig-meeting-2024/

The lab is hosting two rotation students, Aidan and Andrew, in the lab, working on Cryo-EM and HDX-MS of HRI and binding partners. We wish them the best of luck!

In collaboration with Dr Simon Cook’s group at the Babraham, we have discovered that several BRAF inhibitors can paradoxically activate GCN2. Using HDX-MS we were then able to dive into the structural basis of how these compounds work – they seem to poke the kinase into action via the HisRS Read more…

We have a new pre-print from the lab where we look at how heme (or the heme analogue hemin) binds to HRI, and how that prevents its activation. We found some surprising results – including that HRI appears to phosphorylate tyrosine residues! https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.14.607626v2

Our latest research by Vanesa Vinciauskite using HMS Williamina Fleming has been published in collaboration with the groups of Dr Roger Williams and Prof Bart Bart Vanhaesebroeck. Find more information in the paper published in Nature .

Congrats to Lyssa for passing their Masters Viva, and many thanks to Dr Susan Campbell from Sheffield Hallam and our own Dr Gillian Smith for conducting the viva!

Lyssa’s work has been put up on Medrixv for the world to see here: The amino acid stress sensing eIF2α kinase GCN2 is a survival biomarker for malignant mesothelioma

Congratulations to Graham in the lab for the publication in Frontiers in Mol. Neuroscience. It was a hard slog going through a couple hundred papers, and a few hundred genes and PTMs and interaction partners, well done!