A couple of days ago, Jacqui and I attended a dinner for the announcement of the Prime Minister's Science Prizes in Canberra. We were surprised to bump into the mother of one of Jacqui's former PhD students (Janet Deane). As it turned out, her father was part of a team at CSIRO that pioneered the technology that became wireless networking (wiLAN). The leader of that team, John O'Sullivan won the prestigious Prime Minister's Price for Science as a result of that team's work. It turned out that they were all radio astronomers that were trying to come up with practical applications of algorithms they had developed for noise reduction etc in radio signals from space. It was only then that I clicked, remembering the fabulous photograph in the lab of Janet and her sister as small children meeting their dad on his way home from work in Parkes...

Sock Yue Thong won the prize for the best poster and Soumya Joseph won third prize for her poster at the East Coast Protein Meeting, held in Coffs Harbour over the weekend. The ECPM is a joint initiative of the Sydney Protein Group and the Queensland Protein Group and is held every two years. The meeting focuses on giving younger scientists the opportunity to give oral presentations. Socks' poster outlined her work on the structural analysis of proteins in the NuRD complex. Mitch O'Connell, Robyn Mansfield, Ingrid MacIndoe, Vanessa Morris and Paula Vaz won travel awards to attend the meeting.

Mitch O'Connell has followed in Eija's Finnish footsteps. After winning a University Medal for his undergraduate degree in 2008, Mitch has been successful in winning a Cancer Institute NSW Research Scholar Award, which will help fund his research project and provide funding for conference travel and other expenses. Top effort Mitch - the pipette tips are on you!

Fionna Loughlin, who finished her PhD with Joel in 2007, has just been awarded an ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on the structural biology of protein-RNA complexes in the laboratory of Fred Allain in Zürich. Well done Fionna - thoroughly deserved!

Joel teamed up with Richard Green, Jaap Bakker and Jonathan Worswick to win the inaugural Oxfam Trailtrekker 100-km race in the Yorkshire Dales recently. The four of them completed the course (running together), which took in parts of the Pennine Way and the Dales Way, in 13 h 28 min. You can even watch a video of the event (don't worry - it's only 5 min - not 13.5 h!) made by Jaap - including soundtrack!

Richard - ex-postdoctoral associate with Joel - is now working for the Faculty of 1000 in London, trying to make the scientific literature more easily accessible, and was recently interviewed about his predilection for blogging in The Australian newspaper [read the article].

Letter to the editor in The Sydney Morning Herald (Tues 19 May, 2009):
Response to: "Star City, the ugliest building in Sydney (Letters, May 18)?"
"The interior, perhaps, but from the outside it is a model of grace and beauty compared with the UTS Tower, voted Sydney's ugliest building by Herald readers in 2006. But if you ask me, the ugliest is Sydney University's G08 Biochemistry and Microbiology building (1973); more than just brutalist, this is from the Maginot Line school of architecture, inside and out.
Martin Kuskis Lindfield"

The new Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine (LIMM - nice...) has a vert attractive logo on their website! Can you pick which structure it is?

Woo-hooo - the new Bruker Avance 3 800-MHz NMR spectrometer recorded its first 15N and 13C HSQC spectra today, so we have taken our first steps in the ultra-high-field world. Exciting! The cryosystem and probe will be installed over the next 10 days or so, and then we will be rocking! Please submit purified and double/triple labelled proteins (and their binding partners, preferably!) at your leisure...

Mugdha and Ingrid both won poster prizes at the recent Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function for their presentations on LIM homeodomain and hydrophobin proteins, respectively. Miriam-Rose Ash and David Jacques from the crystallography side of the structural biology unit also picked up prizes too - not a bad haul overall!

Ann has finally given in to her desire to work in or near a workshop and been appointed as our new NMR Instrument Manager. In this, she follows in the footsteps of Dr Bill Bubb, who did an excellent job of keeping our 400 and 600-MHz instruments in tip-top condition. Ann's first job is to oversee the installation of our new 800-MHz instrument - not a bad way to kick off! I have a hunch that Ann is going to be an exceptional instrument manager...

Ann was awarded the Young Investigator Medal from the Australian and NZ Society for Magnetic Resonance. This medal recognizes an outstanding contribution to the field of magnetic resonance in Australia and New Zealand, by a researcher who is less than 38 or is less than eight years out of their PhD. Ann has not only carried out high quality research in NMR, but has contributed significantly to the NMR community in Australia, making contributions to conference organization and to teaching at the Wollongong NMR courses in recent years. In the words of our ANZMAG president, Gottfried Otting, Ann has gone from NMR student to imparter of NMR knowledge in the last eight years. Well deserved, Ann!

On the weekend, Joel ran in the Great North Walk 100-miler, run (oddly enough) on the Great North Walk between Newcastle and the northern reaches of Sydney (Patonga). Improbably, he crossed the line first in 26 h 31 min - his first ever win in a solo race. Soon he will be able to walk properly again...

Not only will we be able to buy tips, but Joel and Jacqui will also be able to feed their cats next year. Both of us have secured NHMRC fellowships (SRF B level) to keep us off the streets for the next five years. What a relief!

Hooray - we will be able to buy pipette tips next year! Joel was awarded two ARC Discovery Grants and Jacqui one. Joel's two projects are focused on (a) new functions for zinc finger transcription factors (in collaboration with Merlin Crossley) and (b) novel zinc-finger DNA-binding domains. Jacqui's grant will extend her work on LIM domain transcriptional regulators.

Robyn showed them what she was made of at the recent ComBio conference in Canberra, winning a poster prize for her presentation on the peptide-binding properties of PHD domains. Congratulations Robyn - well deserved!

Wendy Yung, an MSc graduate from the Mackay lab, appeared on ABC National Radio the other day. Wendy has been working at Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre, for a number of years now, and travels around the country with their science roadshow, enthusing people about science. Wendy chatted to Robin Williams about the exhibition that she is currently touring the country with. You can listen to the interview here [note that this link is for the whole science show - you need to head to a spot about 3/4 of the way through to hear Wendy!].

Mugdha Bhati, a smiley PhD student from Jacqui's lab, has been busy winning prizes and fellowships to attend a couple of crystallography conferences. She was awarded a Maslen scholarship from the Society of Crystallographers in Australia and New Zealand to go to the IUCr congress in Osaka, and the School Greg Ralston Travelling Fellowship to go to a crystallography workshop in France. She's got a few new crystals to work on as well!

After a long reviewing process, Dr Liza Cubeddu, a National Breast Cancer Foundation Fellow in Jacqui's lab, has just seen some of her work finally appear in Nature (PubMed). This paper describes a new human single-stranded DNA binding protein that is essential for genomic stability - the work originated from Liza's previous life in St Andrews. Congratulations Liza!

At the seemingly unreasonable time of 1:33 this morning, Thu brought a small bundle of baby girl into the world, with her husband Cuong standing (?) nervously by. She has been named Tho, and had all the expected parts on delivery (nothing worse than waiting for back orders). As reported by Cuong: " We walked to the hospital @ 18:30 on 12/2/08 and walked home @ 18:25 on 13/3/08. Not “Two become One” as a song :D, it is “Two become Three” just after 24 hours…. Congratulations Cuong and Thu!

On Saturday, Jacqui and I ran the Six Foot Track ultramarathon - a particularly nasty 45-km trail run in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Jacqui had been plotting her revenge on the race since 2000, when she went out too hard and had to pull out half way. Her training this time was disciplined and measured, and it paid off better than even she imagined. She had been anticipating finishing in 6:00-6:30, with outside hopes of slipping under 6 h. On the day, she pulverized her expectations and cruised across the line in 5:33 - faster than my time the first time I ran the race many years ago. She was absolutely stoked at the end, and looked like she could have turned around and run back (although i suspect she couldn't have...). I had a good day too on the scale of things - shaving 2 min of my PB to get it down to 4:10 - its going down in *very* small decrements now...

Last weekend, I raced in the Great North Walk 100-mile trail run just north of Sydney, and was lucky enough to come in third, behind David Waugh and Tim Cochrane. It was an awesome run with great scenery, and everything went as well as it could possibly have done on the day. Support crew (Jacqui) was superb, and I managed not to get lost, dehydrated, food-deprived or pulled down into the creeks by the 100's of killer leeches on the course.

Not only have Joel, Jacqui, Ann and Margie been busy getting grants, but Eija Lehtomaki didn't want to miss out either. She has been awarded a Cancer Institute NSW Research Scholar Award, which will help fund her research project and provide funding for conference travel and other expenses. Well done Eija!

At the same time we found out about the grant towards our new NMR spectrometer, Jacqui was awarded an NHMRC Project Grant to continue some of her work on LIM domain complexes, and Margie and Ann were awarded an ARC Discovery Grant to investigate aspects of hydrophobin structure and function. Celebration time!

We met with some success in the latest round of ARC Equipment and Infrastructure grants and have been awarded $1.3M towards the cost of an 800 MHz NMR spectrometer to keep our cryo-equipped 600 company. We also have some commitments from other universities, which means that so long as we can raise the remainder of the funds, we will soon be shopping for a new shiny toy!

Out of curiosity, Paul started writing the languages that people in the lab could speak reasonably fluently on the whiteboard the other day. The list kept getting longer and longer - and ended up with 20! They are: English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesian, Bahasa, Malay, German, French, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Sardinian, Serbian, Russian, Afikaans and Hindi. So, if you need anything translated...

Perhaps even more improbably, Joel recently got together with three blokes from his running club (Jaap Bakker, Richard Green and Jonathan Worswick) and took out the Oxfam Sydney Trailwalker, a 100-km ultramarathon through the bushland of Sydney. The run attracted over 500 teams this year, who run or walk together along some of Sydney's most spectacular bushland to raise money for Oxfam's relief work. Joel's team (The Sydney Striders Foreign Legion) covered the 100 km in a shade under 13 h, finishing more than an hour ahead of the second placed team - the Cosmo Boys from Hong Kong. You can read more at the event web site here.

Improbably, Joel and his rogaining partner Phil Whitten sneaked in by only 20 points (out of 2690) to win the 24-h Australian Rogaining Championships held last weekend in the Eastern MacDonnell Ranges near Alice Springs. For those of you who have never heard of the sport, rogaining is a long-distance version of orienteering. You are given a topographic map with ~50-60 specific points marked on it (each worth different amounts of points) and you have to plan a course to visit as many of them as possible in the allotted time - anywhere from 6-24 h depending on the event. Joel and Phil covered ~90-100 km over the 24 h, across fairly uncompromising central Australian terrain filled with panoramic views and spinifex bushes. The web site for the event is here

At the East Coast Protein Meeting, which was held last weekend at Coffs Harbour, the lab took home more than their fair share of the prizes! Mugdha Bhati won the prize for the best student talk, and Chu Kong Liew was runner-up for the best presentation by a non-student. Molly Clifton won the prize for the best poster, and Melinda Tan was a runner-up in the same category. Well worth the trip up the coast and the hardship of staying at the Opal Cove resort for a couple of days!

Sally Eaton, fresh from her PhD in Merlin Crossley's lab upstairs, has joined Jacqui's lab for a period of postdoctoral work. Sally will now have worked with Joel/Dave (BSc Hons), Merlin *and* Jacqui - placing her well to decide who is the best supervisor (not that we are competitive...).

Mats Gustaffson is an undergraduate from Uppsala University in Sweden who has joined the lab (as of today) as part of the research training component of his undergraduate degree. He will work with Ann on developing the use of ribosome display and phage display for protein engineering.

Sandra Wissmüller recently attended the 6th Discovery Science and Biotechnology Meeting in Brisbane, where she was awarded an Early Career Researcher poster prize for her poster: Specific Interactions of Sox Proteins with many Transcription Factors. The work described there was part of her PhD thesis in her former lab in Germany and was published last year. The sponsors give half of the money directly to the winners and use the other half to pay the registration fee for any other conference the winner chooses to attend.

Margie and Ann were recently awarded an ARC Linkage Grant to investigate the possible biotechnological uses of hydrophobin proteins. The work is a collaboration with the German chemical company BASF.

At the recent GATA factors conference on the Mediterranean island of Capri, Jason was invited to present his work on the DNA_binding properties of C. elegans GATA zinc fingers. He gave a great account of his work, injecting a little bit of structural biology into an otherwise developmentally dominated conference.

The Bulletin, a current affairs magazine, is publishing a list of the people it considers "the 100 smartest, most innovative and most creative people currently working in Australia". We think that there must have been a mixup between this list and the related list of the 100 biggest smartarses in Australia, because somehow Joel has ended up on the list, which is currently being released 10-at-a-time in the magazine [see article and profiles].

One of our most prized structures, the GATA:FOG zinc finger complex, features in the Protein Data Bank's Molecule of the Month section for March 2007. Check it out! A couple of our recent reviews of the field (Sunde and Matthews and Gamsjaeger et al.) were also used to create the feature.

Mugdha Bhati won a Student Poster Prize at the recent Biomolecular Dynamics and Interactions 2007 Meeting: From Single Molecules to Complex Assemblies. With Jacqui chairing the meeting (and no she wasn't a poster judge) and Joel chairing a session, there was a very heavy lab influence - even if it was held in Melbourne.

Cuong Dinh Ngyuen, a graduate of the Hanoi National University and currently working at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, has been awarded a Government Scholarship to carry out an MSc in the lab. He will arrive in the second semester of 2007.

Dr Josep Font from Catelonia in Spain has just been awarded a Research Fellowship from the Spanish government to join the lab for two years. Josep (Pep) has worked extensively on the thermodynamics of folding of ribonuclease A, under the tutelage of Prof. Maria Vilanova at the University of Girona.

Daniel Ryan was awarded NHMRC CJ Martin and EMBO postdoctoral fellowships in the most recent rounds. Once he decides which one is more lucrative, it will fund his stay in Tom Owen-Hughes' laboratory at the University of Dundee. Great effort Daniel!

Joel and Jacqui were recently awarded 1-year grants from the Cancer Institute NSW to examine specific aspects of cancer biology.

Dr Liza Cubeddu has been successful in obtaining a three-year research grant from the International Society for Cancer Research; this grant will fund the work that she is doing in collaboration with Jacqui on the analysis of protein interactions involved in breast cancer progression.

Fionna has proven that her Lorne Poster Prize this year was no fluke by winning a poster prize at the 2006 ComBio conference in Brisbane. Her poster described structural and functional details of RanBP-like zinc finger domains.

Dr Dave Gell was successful in the recent round of ARC Discovery Grants - he was awarded a Discovery Grant to continue his analysis of the alpha-hemoglobin stabilizing protein AHSP. The grant included an Australian Research Fellowship, so that will keep him off the streets for the next five years and keep Henry in nappies.

Fionna has scaled the heights of poster prizeness by picking up one of the poster prizes at the 2006 Lorne Protein Conference, for her poster on the splicing factor ZNF265.

Joel has been awarded the 2006 Gottschalk Medal of the Australian Academy of Science. This award, in memory of Dr A Gottschalk, is given to recognise outstanding research in the medical sciences by scientists under 40 years. Joel is the second member of the School of MMB to be awarded this Medal - Merlin Crossley was the recipient in 2002. Other past recipients include John Shine, Nic Nicola, Michael Parker, Doug Hilton and David Vaux.

Daniel Ryan won the Sydney Protein Group Thompson Prize, for the best talk given by a young scientist, at the 2005 Thompson Prize Night at Macquarie University on Dec 7th. At the same event it was announced that Molly Clifton and Mugdha Bhati won travelling fellowships to enable them to attend the Lorne Protein Conference in 2006. Check out the SPG website for more information and photos!

Congratulations to Dave and his wife Fiona Stennard who have just become the proud parents of a young lad - who has been given the regal name of Henry. Everyone appears to be doing well...

In yet more ARC success this year, Jacqui was successful in her bid for a Discovery Grant to fund her work on LIM domain proteins and their role in mammalian development.

In a continuation of their long collaboration, Joel and Merlin have been awarded a $550K ARC Discovery Grant to work on transcriptional regulators involved in hematopoiesis.

Dr Ann Kwan has won a prestigious ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the current round of ARC funding. This fellowship is just reward for Ann's abilities and is a great stepping stone for her career as a researcher. She intends to work on protein design using combinatorial display methods.

Dr Margie Sunde has just been awarded a thoroughly deserved RD Wright fellowship from the NHMRC. This five-year fellowship is very prestigious and will give Margie a great chance to consolidate her research with independent funding.

We recently were awarded funding to set up a robotic crystallization facility, and have purchased liquid handling, crystallization and visualization robots in order to improve our hit rate with protein crystallization. These instruments have recently arrived in the School, and promise to usher in a new era of whizz bang apparatus for Ann to play with (not to mention fast crystal screens...).

Joel and Dave, in collaboration with David Adams at the Sanger Institute in the UK, have been awarded an NHMRC Project Grant to study the structure and function of a zinc finger protein with a putative role in the regulation of alternative splicing. This project has produced some very enticing preliminary data and the funding will provide the opportunity to follow these data through.

Together with Merlin Crossley, Joel and Jacqui were recently awarded $2.8M in a five-year NHMRC Program Grant, to persue their work on understanding the molecular basis of gene regulation. Only a handful of these grants, which emphasize collaborations between high-performing teams of researchers, are given out each year. There was excitement all round!

Fionna Loughlin and Ann Kwan both won prizes at the recent East Coast Protein Meeting. Held at the Opal Cove resort in Coffs Harbour, ECPM was a superbly run and very interesting meeting chaired by Philippa Stokes (a third year PhD student in the lab) and put together with her team of organizers Sharon Pursglove, Molly Clifton (both from the lab) and Kate Quinlan (Crossley lab). Fionna won an outstanding student talk award, and Ann won a prize for her first poster as a grown up.

Recent Mackay lab alumnus Belinda Westman has entered what looks to be a very long term collaboration with current Matthews Lab member Daniel Ryan. Date of formalization of this collaboration to be announced... - update - looks like Jan 7 2006...

Daniel Ryan has scored one of the 2005 ASBMB Fellowships, designed to allow PhD students to travel to an international conference of their choosing. Competition for these awards is fierce every year, so it is a great achievement for him to have won one of these. He is using the prize to attend the Protein Society meeting in Barcelona this year - and i am sure he won't be spending any of his trip lying on the Costa del Sol - it will all be working hard at the meeting...

Sharon has announced the impending arrival of a new prospective Hons student, although it might take a few years before they are able to hold a Gilson properly. We are all hoping that things go well for Sharon, and that she is able to find something stylish in the maternity lab coat range...

On 24-26 June this year, the SPG and QPG will be co-hosting the East Coast Protein meeting at the luxurious Opal Cove Resort in Coffs Harbour. This year, the meeting will be organized almost entirely by Philippa Stokes, Sharon Pursglove, Molly Clifton, Ann Kwan and Kate Edwards. So far, they have secured two invited speakers, and plenty of sponsorship money, ensuring that the conference will be a great success (as long as they can get a few registrants...). Looking good so far!

Mike Swanton capped off his PhD in the lab by winning one of the poster prizes at the 2005 Lorne Protein Conference for a presentation on the work he has been carrying out over the last couple of years on zinc-finger:DNA interactions. This work has been going well over the last 10 months or so, and the meeting was a great chance for Mike to show people what he had achieved in this time.

After about 7 years of painstaking work (!), we have finally been able to solve and publish the structure of the complex formed between the N-terminal zinc finger of GATA-1 and a classical finger from FOG. This work was made very difficult by the weak nature of the complex (~10⁴-10⁵ M^-1), which presented line-broadening problems. Finally though, we got there and were able to report the structure in PNAS (Track II) - a great relief for all involved! Now to bring in other members of these complexes...

Dr Roland Gamsjaeger from the University of Linz was awarded an Austrian Shroedinger Fellowship to come to the lab for two years - Roland will arrive in a couple of months and brings expertise in Biacore and AFM with him.

The structure of the complex formed between full-length LMO4 and the LMO4-binding region of ldb1 was published recently in EMBO J. This structure revealed a very unusual binding mode - a tandem beta-zipper, in which the ldb1 forms additional beta-strands to add on to hairpins in both of the LIM domains. The structure provides an extremely extended interface, and Daniel and others have been able to map the important residues for binding using mutagenesis and yeast two-hybrid experiments. Now the design work can begin!

Janet Deane was awarded the Young Brilliance prize from the Cure Cancer Australia Foundation last night. This prize is awarded annually to an Australian PhD student who has made an outstanding contribution to understanding and curing cancer. The award was presented at a gala dinner at UNSW, and Janet has been receiving lots of attention from the press!

Dave Gell won the Edman Award from the ASBMB - a prize given to postdoctoral researchers with less than seven years experience after completing their PhD. Dave will present his work at ComBio 2004 (in Perth) and receive a big dollop of cash as well!

Ann Kwan and Janet Deane were awarded Travelling Fellowships from the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. These highly competitive awards provide funding for the recipients to attend an international conference in their field.

Philippa Stokes won a poster prize at the Lorne Protein conference last week for her work on the CtIP:BRCA1:LMO complex. She was pleased! She plans to not release the movie rights just yet, in order to increase interest among the larger studios.

Chu Kong Liew was recently awarded a four-year CJ Martin Postdoctoral Fellowship from the NHMRC. He has used this fellowship to embark on an overseas adventure to that centre of culture (and basketball) UCLA, where he is working in the lab of Rob Clubb. He is continuing in the world of protein interactions and structural biology, and hopes to make an impact in the pick-up 3 on 3 games around campus.

Jacqui has won the Clive and Sylvia Viertel Medical Research Fellowship for 2003. Only one of these prestigious five-year fellowships was awarded this year Australia-wide. As well as a salary, this fellowship provides additional money for a research assistant and some consumables.

Joel was awarded an ARC Discovery Grant (Biophysical characterization of protein interactions within a transcription factor network) for 2004-2006.

Daniel Ryan won a prize for his poster on the TAL1:LMO2:ldb1 interaction at ComBio 2003 in Melbourne last week.

Joel, together with Gottfried Otting (ANU), Philip Kuchel and others, has obtained funding (AUD750K) to install a cryosystem on the MMB's 600 MHz NMR spectrometer. The system will come with two probeheads - a TXI (HCN) probe (for protein and other 1H work) and a CH dual probe for metabolic work.

At the recent Asian Crystallographic Association (AsCA) in Broome, Western Australia, the PDB announced the initiation of the PDB Poster Prize for best student poster presentation in macromolecular crystallography. The prize was awarded to Janet Deane for her work conducted in collaboration with Dr Megan Maher and Dr Mitchell Guss.

At the recent East Coast Protein Meeting, held at Coffs Harbour, Daniel Ryan won a prize for the best student poster, for his presentation entitled "Using LMO2:ldb1 fusion protein sto probe multi-protein transcriptional complexes". For his efforts, he was awarded $500 towards attending the ComBio2003 conference in Melbourne this September.

Joel was profiled (briefly!) in The Sydney Morning Herald's new Health and Science section this week. I know we don't use radioactive waves, but it is the press...

Philippa Stokes and Belinda Westman took out two of the poster prizes at the recent Lorne Conference for Protein Structure and Function. At the same meeting, Joel gave a talk on Ann Kwan and Belinda Sharpe's protein design work, and Jacqui chaired a session. Overall, a good time was had by all (as usual at Lorne!).

Our most recent paper, a collaboration with Peter Karuso, on the solution properties of DNA-binding ruthenium complexes, made the cover of Dalton Transactions, a Royal Society of Chemistry journal.

Postdoctoral and Research Assistant positions are currently available in the Mackay and Matthews labs.
Download PDF advertisement for postdoc.
Contact Joel or Jacqui for more information.

A consortium headed by Gottfried Otting and Joel was recently awarded $1.53M from the ARC's large equipment grant fund (LIEF). This grant, which was the largest of its kind, will allow the purchase of an 800 MHz NMR spectrometer equipped with a cryosystem.

The instrument will be situated at the Research School of Chemistry at ANU and the University of Sydney will have ~20-25% of the measurement time. This will be a tremendous boost to our capabilities, allowing the recording of full datasets in substantially reduced times, as well as greatly improving signal-to-noise over the current instrumentation.

A team comprising Merlin Crossley (USyd), Andrew Perkins (Monash) and Joel was awarded an NIH R01 grant (~AUD1.2M) to study the repression of fetal gamma globin.

A crack team, made up of Janet Deane, Ann Kwan, Chu Wai Liew and Wendy Yung, took out the 15 in 24 hour event at the recent NSW Rogaining Championships, held in Nowendoc north of Newcastle. Joel and Jacqui also competed (in the 24 h event) and were placed third. A good time and much navigating was had by all...

Both Jacqui and Joel won NH&MRC Project Grants for 2003-2005. Joel's grant ($225,000) is to understand the way in which specific transcription factors synergise in controlling blood cell development, while Jacqui's grant ($420,000) is to work on the structure and interactions of several oncogenic transcription factors and the protein-protein complexes that they form.

One of the PhD students in Joel's lab, Wendy Yung, won the major poster prize at the recent ComBio2002 conference, held in Sydney. The prize, sponsored by the Biochemical Journal, included a subscription to the journal as well as a hefty cheque!

Both Jacqui and Joel were awarded ARC Discovery Grants for 2003-2005. Jacqui's grant ($300,000) will allow her to continue her work aimed at understanding the role of specific transcription factors in the control of gene expression, and to begin to design specific reagents that may interfere with aberrent expression of certain genes. Joel's grant will allow us to probe the structure and function of a novel protein involved in the regulation of globin production. This grant ($600,000) included a prestigious ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship for David Gell (who has been working in the Mackay lab on a Wellcome Trust Travelling Fellowship for two years). If you are interested in working in our labs on this or another project, contact Jacqui or Joel.

In a dinner held at Parliament House in Canberra several weeks ago, Joel was presented with the Science Minister's Prize for Life Scientist of the Year. The award came with a $35,000 cheque and a medal. The award was given for the contribution made by Joel and his research group towards understanding the role of zinc-binding domains in controlling gene expression.