LAB NEWS
Latest Stories
November, 2018
Clues to making drugs for "undruggable" targets
Georg Petzold and Richard Bunker from the lab, together with the group of Benjamin Ebert at Harvard’s Broad Institute, show how thalidomide analogs mediate degradation of many more proteins than previously anticipated. These proteins – zinc finger transcription factors – play a role in cancer and developmental diseases but are difficult drug targets. The new study, published in Science, suggests that thalidomide analogs can be rationally designed to target this challenging class of proteins. Read more...
September, 2018
Welcome to Zuzanna Kozicka, a new Ph.D. student in the lab! Zuzanna is joining us from the University of Edinburgh and will be working on finding novel chemical matter for targeted degradation of DNA-binding proteins. She's already prepared for the Swiss wintertime/cold room protein purifcations as you can see in the photo. We're excited to have you in the lab!
December, 2018
FMI Cake Competition *WINNERS*!
With Titan Krios time sometimes being a limitation in cryo-EM, we decided to bake our own! Equipped with a "cake two" camera. Don't let the outside fool you, inside we have 6 layers of lemon cake, biscuit cake and chocolate cake, with chocolate and vanilla buttercream, chocolate ganache and cherry jam! Thanks to cake expert, Sabine Pfister, for her guidance and helping us to be voted FMI Christmas Party Best Tasting Cake 2018.
July, 2019
DNA damage detection in nucleosomes
Syota Matsumoto, Simone Cavadini and Richard Bunker from the lab publish how DNA damage is recognized in the context of chromatin. This involves the DNA damage factor, UV-DDB 'register shifting' the DNA within the nucleosome in order to gain access to occluded sites of UV-damage. See their article in Nature published this week!
July, 2019
Molecular interesection of DNA repair and immune regulation
Congratulations to Julius Rabl, Richard Bunker, Andreas Schenk and colleagues for their recent publication in Molecular Cell! Their work provides insight into how DNA double-strand breaks are recognized by BRCA1-A and resection is suppressed, as well as a unique role of the BRISC complex. They find that interestingly, BRISC, which shares molecular components with BRCA1-A, regulates protein degradation by the endosomal-lysosomal pathway through deubiquitination and is inhibited by the metabolic enzyme SHMT2 to regulate immunity.
Also, special congrats to Julius in his new position as a technical expert at the ScopEM facility newly established at ETH Zurich.
