Congratulations to Ram and Brooke! Their paper on ICL1 assay development is published in MedChemComm (impact factor: 2.608) today.
Thanks also to Krunal (Reynisson Group) for virtual screening, Anne (Sperry Group) for the synthesis of methylisocitrate and Ghader for his help in ICL1 expression and purification.
The paper is published in the open access format. You can view the paper via the link below:
Finally, we would also like to thank the Maurice and Phyllis Paykel Trust for a grant-in-aid that enabled us to conduct the experiments that were described in the paper.
Ram, who is supervised by A/Prof. Jon Sperry and Ivan, gave a talk at the ‘Selected PhD Presentations (15 minutes)’ session on his work on tuberculosis proteins.
Congratulations to Mike, who won the third prize of the General Poster Competition on his poster ‘NMR Toolkit for Fragment-based Inhibitor Screening’.
Oi Wei, Dona, Jinal, Naasson and Ryan (whose main supervisor is A/Prof. Sperry) gave two-minute talks in the ‘1st Year PhD Presentations’ session.
Danilo and Praveen (who is supervised by A/Prof. McGillivray, Prof. Brothers and Ivan) gave poster presentations.
Well done all!
Mike winning the third prize in the General Poster CompetitionDona giving her 2-minute presentationOi Wei giving her 2-minute presentationNaasson giving his 2-minute presentationJinal giving her 2-minute presentationDanilo and his poster
The work that was presented in Mike’s poster involved the application of virtual screening and biophysical techniques to discover new inhibitors of heat shock protein 90. This work was conducted in collaboration with Yu, Nasri, and Daniel Ayine-Tora from the group of Dr Jóhannes Reynisson. This work was published in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters earlier this year.
Aimee and Ivan also attended the meeting. Aimee presented a poster on her work tackling antibiotic resistance, and Ivan gave a talk at the infectious disease session on the development of isocitrate lyase 1 inhibitors, work that was conducted by Ram and Brooke in collaboration with Associate Professor Jon Sperry, Dr Jóhannes Reynisson and Dr Ghader Bashiri.
Mike was awarded one of the three student poster prizes at the QMB Proteins Satellite Meeting.Mike and his poster during the poster session
Congratulations to Naasson and Praveen for their new paper in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry. In the paper, we talked about the applications of NMR spectroscopy to study a superfamily of enzymes that utilises 2-oxoglutarate as cosubstrate and Fe(II) as cofactor. You can read the paper by following the link here.
Congratulations to Yu, who has submitted her PhD Thesis earlier today. Yu, who is co-supervised by Professor Paul Kilmartin and Ivan, conducted biochemical studies to characterise polyphenol oxidase from grapes. Yu was very hardworking during her PhD research, and she also looked after the laboratory, in particular when the group was in Grafton, in her ‘spare’ time. A couple of manuscripts from Yu’s PhD work are currently under review. Well done Yu and thank you for your hard work!
Jane Pernes and Johanna Viluma, both current students at the University of Bristol, have spent their July and August working on several research projects in our lab. Jane worked with Danilo on the expression and purification of human and bacterial ribosomal proteins, whilst Jane worked on NMR data analyses, including protein backbone assignment and distance measurements using NOE experiments. Both Jane and Johanna did excellent jobs in their ‘summer’ research. We hope that they have enjoyed their stay in New Zealand and we wish them the very best of luck in their future studies and careers.
We thank the University of Auckland Northern Hemisphere Summer Research Scholarship scheme for funding.
Congratulations to Brooke for submitting her BScH thesis today. Brooke, who is supervised by Ivan and Dr Jon Sperry, successfully completed an ambitious project that included organic synthesis and the development of new biophysical tools to study protein-inhibitor interactions. She also contributed to a Review paper on targeting the Mycobacterium tuberculosis enzyme isocitrate lyase to treat tuberculosis. Well done Brooke.
We also welcome three new students to our group today. Nabangshu Sharma, who did his MSc at the University of Delhi, joins us as a PhD student. Johanna Viluma and Jane Pernes, both from the University of Bristol, join us as the ‘Northern Hemisphere Summer Scholarship’ students.
The University of Auckland Summer Research Scholarships are now open for application. The Leung Group has three available projects this year. This is a good opportunity for students to gain experience working in a research laboratory, and learn about how research is done at the chemistry and biology interface. Interested students should contact Ivan directly (preferably by email) before applying. Please see the two links below for projects that are available and information on how to apply.
Earlier this month, Ram attended the 253rd American Chemical Society National Meeting & Exposition, which was held in San Francisco between the 2nd and 6th of April. He gave a presentation in the Medicinal Chemistry session on his work in the development and application of NMR and inhibition assays to study mycobacterial isocitrate lyase. This work was conducted together with Krunal Patel, Brooke Kwai, Dr Ghader Bashiri, Dr Jóhannes Reynisson and A/Prof. Jonathan Sperry. The programme of the conference can be downloaded here. Well done Ram!
