Posts from the ‘News’ Category

Lab alum Kyle Lancaster makes it big!

Kyle Lancaster, a 2005 graduate of the Crane Lab, has been doing great things since graduating.  He received his Ph.D. with the world-famous inorganic chemist Harry Gray (at CalTech), and did a very successful post-doc at Cornell, which culminated in his solving one of the biggest outstanding questions in biochemistry – determining the identity of the central atom in the cofactor of nitrogenase, which was announced in his first author Science paper (spoiler alert, it’s carbon):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6058/974.abstract

Kyle has just recently signed with Cornell University for a more permanent position – this fall he’ll be an assistant professor of chemistry!

No formal lab meeting 02/22

No formal lab meeting 02/22, but i will be around to discuss lab issues.

Lab Meeting 02/16 and Geo lectures 02/15 and 02/16

This Wednesday night at 8:15 pm (in Rose Hills Theater) and Thursday at 11:00 (same place) is the geology Woodford-Eckis lecture(s), given by Dr. John Grotzinger, is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology at the California Institute of Technology and also serves as the Project Scientist for JPL’s recently launched Mars Science Laboratory.
Some of you may know that I don’t hold out any hope for life on Mars due to its lack of nitrogen (we can talk about it at a lab meeting, but basically there’s essentially no nitrogen in rocks, so if it isn’t in the atmosphere it isn’t there – and Mars has almost no atmosphere and no nitrogen, so it’s hard to imagine life that we could recognize) but that doesn’t mean that there won’t evidence of past life on Mars.

Thursday night we’ll have lab meeting starting at somewhere between 6-6:30.  I’ll wait to see how many people can make it on that alternate night to see what the subject will be.

Lab News – Group meeting 10/25

The  next group meeting will be on 10/25 at 7 p.m. in the chem lounge.   We’ll do  journal club, and Scott Humbarger will present the following paper from last month:

Lab News – Group meeting 10/4

Joe Tseng will present on his development of PCR primers that act as probes for enzymes involved in sulfur reduction, at 7 p.m. in the chemistry lounge.

Lab News – Group meeting 9/27

Crane Lab Group Meeting – Tuesday September 27th at 7:00 p.m.

E.J. will lead the journal club.  The article discusses the discovery of a new type of foldase/chaperone – one that is important for survival at low, rather than high, temperature.  Takes the ideas about the role of heat shock proteins and thinks about them in reverse – what if there’s too little, rather than too much, protein flexibility?

Alex and Albert will be responsible for snacks, and we may have some people from the Saz lab joining us for the fun.

Journal Club Article: Proteomics of life at low temperatures: trigger factor is the primary chaperone in the Antarctic bacterium Pseudoalteromonas haloplanktis TAC125.

Available here:  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2958.2010.07084.x/pdf

Lab News – Group meeting 9/20

Jane Xu will talk about how one goes about knocking genes out of Shewanella at 7 p.m. in the chem. lounge.  Joe and Danny are in charge of bringing snacks.

Actually, Jane will be talking about how one can knock genes out of Shewanella anytime, not specifically at 7 p.m. in the chem lounge.  That’s when and where the meeting will be.

Lab News – Group meeting 9/13

Kevin Sea will lead a journal club discussion of : “Methionine sulphoxide reductases protect iron-sulphur clusters from oxidative inactivation in yeast”

available at http://mic.sgmjournals.org/content/155/2/612.long

Jane Xu will present on 9/20 on her work in Shewanella

Lab News – Group Meeting 9/7

Crane Lab Group Meeting – Tuesday September 6th 7:00 p.m.

Scott Humbarger will describe his summer research at Illinois Champagne-Urbana, and we’ll discuss the last three pages of the cys desulfurase article (focusing on the mechanism of persulfide formation/reaction)

article to be discussed: http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.libraries.claremont.edu/content/wq542jg4ggk0u281/

cysteine desulfurase review article (Bacterial cysteine desulfurases: versatile key players in biosynthetic pathways of sulfur-containing biofactors, Ryota Hidese, Hisaaki Mihara and Nobuyoshi Esaki, Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, July 2011)

Lab News – Group Meeting 8/30

Crane Lab Group Meeting – Tuesday August 30th 7:00 p.m.

article to be discussed: http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.libraries.claremont.edu/content/wq542jg4ggk0u281/

cysteine desulfurase review article (Bacterial cysteine desulfurases: versatile key players in biosynthetic pathways of sulfur-containing biofactors, Ryota Hidese, Hisaaki Mihara and Nobuyoshi Esaki, Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, July 2011)