We have a new PhD Student in the lab! Welcome Zoe - she comes to work with us from the award winning Hemer Lab (Check them out here: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/87008-katie-a-hemer).
Her project will be based around ancient immunology, using proteomic approaches to catalogue the ancient immune system with the aim of finding ancient autoimmunity. Oh you thought autoimmunity was a new thing? Old as bones.
We are all looking forward to what you find Zoe!
Congratulations to Dr Christophe Lalaurie who has had 2 papers published in as many weeks!
Firstly he played a crucial role in this simulation of the globular head of C1q (With Nicole Rodgers first author from her BSc). This paper showed a potential correlation between C1q's ability to bind CRP, and temperature, suggesting a potential energy window for interaction.
Before publishing a comprehensive simulation of B2GPI with a lot of help from our friends at the Delcea Lab in Greifswald (https://biochemie.uni-greifswald.de/en/forschung/forschung-in-den-arbeitskreisen/ordner-aks-lehrstuehle/biophysikalische-chemie/prof-dr-mihaela-delcea/) and Prof. Paul Dalby here at UCL (https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/8354-paul-dalby).
This shows the differences in the unravelling of the circular form of B2GPI between the wild-type and the plasmin clipped version. Its a great paper with some wonderfully developed methods even if we do say so ourselves!
Well done Christophe, Nicole, The Delcea Lab, Prof. Dalby and everyone involved!
We have a new Post Doc in the McDonnell Laboratory. Dr Karen Feehan has joined the lab as our resident monocyte/macrophage expert and brings much needed expertise in flow cytometry the laboratory. Karen's projects will be looking at phenotyping cellular responses across a number of autoimmune disorders whilst in the lab.
Welcome Karen, its great to have you aboard!
