Reid Alderson, a student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he worked with John Markley at NMRFAM, will join the group for a DPhil starting in October 2014.

Well done to Ben Girling for getting the Part II thesis prize!

We’ve recently published a paper on membraneless organelles in Molecular Cell. A number of compartments exist in the cell that are not distinguished by membranes, including the nucleolus and Cajal bodies. We show in this work that the formation of one of these bodies is the result of a Flory-Huggin’s phase transition, and is a consequence of a very specific charge patterning of its chain. By having blocks of positive charge, housing aromatic residues, flanked by blocks and negative charge (and vice versa), phase separation (above a critical concentration, at the right salt concentration) is an inevitability. This is a neat example of important phenomena in biology having its footing firmly in polymer theory.

We’re delighted to welcome into the group Adam Marsden, Gogulan Karunanithy and Anna Van Der Zalm, starting September 2014.

And congratulations to Ben Girling and Elodie Limer for a successful year and getting their reports done!

An exciting paper on lipids has just been published in Nature. This is the culmination of a huge amount of work, particularly by Art Laganowsky and Eamon Reading in Carol Robinson’s group. In this work, it is demonstrated that specific individual lipid binding events can change the structure and the function of membrane proteins. This remains a tricky thing to measure, but this paper establishes a rigorous mass spectrometry method for quantitatively determining the binding. This requires statistical strategies to deal with the stochastic fluctuations inherent to molecules that are being introduced to the gas phase.

Completed while the spectrometer was dead last year, here’s a paper on CPMG. There are a number of formula to describe the CPMG experiment in the limit of 2 site exchange, perfect pulses and in-phase magnetisation. The most enduring is that of Carver and Richard’s, penned in Oxford in the 1970s, correct in the limit pb<resources section.

Group roast Easter 2014 :) at Andy’s house.
Conclusion: well fed group == happy group

Group Xmas Roast 2013 :) at Andy’s house
(giant turkey)