Amy Weeks
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amyweeks.bsky.social
Amy Weeks
@amyweeks.bsky.social
Asst Prof @ UW-Madison Biochemistry. Protein Engineering, Chemical Biology, Proteomics, Proteases, Enzymology.
Reposted by Amy Weeks
A beautiful example of how spatiotemporal dynamics can enable multiplexed measurements.
September 16, 2025 at 11:36 AM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Excited to share our new preprint, which was years in the making! chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...
New reactions are typically developed by trial and error. How can we speed up this process? Read on to learn how we used DNA scaffolding to perform >500,000 parallel reactions on attomole scale.
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DNA-Scaffolded Ultrahigh-Throughput Reaction Screening
Discovering and optimizing reactions is central to synthetic chemistry. However, chemical reactions are traditionally screened using relatively low-throughput methods, prohibiting exploration of diver...
chemrxiv.org
August 14, 2025 at 5:40 PM
New preprint: we developed a method that uses phosphoproteome-derived peptide libraries (PhosPropels) for deep specificity profiling of phosphatases and phospholyases www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
August 13, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Check out our new manuscript on parallel LC separations! Super cool how the very high scan rates of modern MS systems coupled with DIA can allow us to run several samples at the same time with little loss in depth. Congrats to Noah and the team. #JASMS pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
SynchroSep-MS: Parallel LC Separations for Multiplexed Proteomics
Achieving high throughput remains a challenge in MS-based proteomics for large-scale applications. We introduce SynchroSep-MS, a novel method for parallelized, label-free proteome analysis that leverages the rapid acquisition speed of modern mass spectrometers. This approach employs multiple liquid chromatography columns, each with an independent sample, simultaneously introduced into a single mass spectrometer inlet. A precisely controlled retention time offset between sample injections creates distinct elution profiles, facilitating unambiguous analyte assignment. We modified the DIA-NN workflow to effectively process these unique parallelized data, accounting for retention time offsets. Using a dual-column setup with mouse brain peptides, SynchroSep-MS detected approximately 16,700 unique protein groups, nearly doubling the peptide information obtained from a conventional single proteome analysis. The method demonstrated excellent precision and reproducibility (median protein %RSDs less than 4%) and high quantitative linearity (median R2 greater than 0.96) with minimal matrix interference. SynchroSep-MS represents a new paradigm for data collection and the first example of label-free multiplexed proteome analysis via parallel LC separations, offering a direct strategy to accelerate throughput for demanding applications such as large-scale clinical cohorts and single-cell analyses without compromising peak capacity or causing ionization suppression.
pubs.acs.org
July 30, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Excited to share our latest: we engineered the reactivity of a bacterial E1-like enzyme for ATP-driven modification of C termini. Our tool mimics the logic of peptide bond formation in biology for precision modification of proteins in vitro. 🧪https://rdcu.be/ewN7C
Engineered reactivity of a bacterial E1-like enzyme enables ATP-driven modification of protein and peptide C termini
Nature Chemistry - In living systems, ATP provides an energetic driving force for protein synthesis and modification. Now, an engineered enzymatic tool has been developed for high-yield, ATP-driven...
rdcu.be
July 18, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Great success at the Ono Pharma Foundation Symposium in Boston! Highlights include inspiring talks by Xiao Wang @amyweeks.bsky.social‬ Robert Spitale @stevenbanik.bsky.social@michael-erb.bsky.social‬ Matthew Shoulders Michelle Arkin and a keynote from Chuan He. Posters fueled inspired exchange.
July 2, 2025 at 1:32 AM
Congrats to Weeks lab graduate student Debashrito Deb @thepeptidetailor.bsky.social, who won a poster prize at the Bioorganic GRC last week! Thanks to conference chairs @doc-jlmeier.bsky.social and Denise Field who knocked it out of the park with a memorable and inspiring meeting this year!
June 26, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Despite ~20 years in/around #chembio research, I went to my first Bioorganic GRC this week. This community is amazing and so supportive. I feel energized (and tired, lol) and find myself rooting for the next generation of chemical biologists. Sooooo much awesome science - We can’t/won’t be stopped!
June 21, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
The 13th General Meeting of the International Proteolysis Society will be held in Búsios, Brazil Oct 26-30, 2025. Training workshops will be held at the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz Oct 23-23. Register now! Links below.

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May 22, 2025 at 4:22 AM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
excited to share our latest work now online
@natmetabolism.nature.com, led by
@kyle-flickinger.bsky.social, where we unravel a mechanistic basis for the conditional essentiality of NADK, one of the many interesting hits from our previously reported CRISPR screening with HPLM rdcu.be/ekpu6
May 2, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Beautifully written letter by Harvard's president, pushing back against the illegal assault of the Republicans on universities:
www.harvard.edu/president/ne...
The Promise of American Higher Education
No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue
www.harvard.edu
April 15, 2025 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Congratulations to our lab's very own @elliott.weix.us on being awarded a Goldwater Scholarship! He's really an amazing and very accomplished young scientist and I couldn't be more proud of him 🥳🥳 ! news.wisc.edu/three-uw-mad...
Three UW–Madison students named 2025 Goldwater Scholars
Three University of Wisconsin–Madison students have been named winners of 2025 Goldwater Scholarships, the premier undergraduate scholarship in mathematics, engineering and the natural sciences in the...
news.wisc.edu
April 9, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Three UW–Madison students have received 2025 Goldwater Scholarships, the preeminent undergraduate scholarship in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering in the United States.

Congratulations to Alissa Choi, Elliott Weix and Pramana Saldin!
Three UW–Madison students named 2025 Goldwater Scholars
Three University of Wisconsin–Madison students have been named winners of 2025 Goldwater Scholarships, the premier undergraduate scholarship in mathematics, engineering and the natural sciences in the...
news.wisc.edu
April 9, 2025 at 6:54 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Excited to share that our cell surface proteome review is now online on Chemical Reviews! 🥰 We highlight recent advances of techniques mapping cell surface protein expression, protein-protein interactions, extracellular PTMs and MHC complexes. @jimwellsucsf.bsky.social pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Engineered Proteins and Chemical Tools to Probe the Cell Surface Proteome
The cell surface proteome, or surfaceome, is the hub for cells to interact and communicate with the outside world. Many disease-associated changes are hard-wired within the surfaceome, yet approved drugs target less than 50 cell surface proteins. In the past decade, the proteomics community has made significant strides in developing new technologies tailored for studying the surfaceome in all its complexity. In this review, we first dive into the unique characteristics and functions of the surfaceome, emphasizing the necessity for specialized labeling, enrichment, and proteomic approaches. An overview of surfaceomics methods is provided, detailing techniques to measure changes in protein expression and how this leads to novel target discovery. Next, we highlight advances in proximity labeling proteomics (PLP), showcasing how various enzymatic and photoaffinity proximity labeling techniques can map protein–protein interactions and membrane protein complexes on the cell surface. We then review the role of extracellular post-translational modifications, focusing on cell surface glycosylation, proteolytic remodeling, and the secretome. Finally, we discuss methods for identifying tumor-specific peptide MHC complexes and how they have shaped therapeutic development. This emerging field of neo-protein epitopes is constantly evolving, where targets are identified at the proteome level and encompass defined disease-associated PTMs, complexes, and dysregulated cellular and tissue locations. Given the functional importance of the surfaceome for biology and therapy, we view surfaceomics as a critical piece of this quest for neo-epitope target discovery.
pubs.acs.org
April 4, 2025 at 8:19 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Thank you CBC for covering our latest study using
#proteomics and rapid patient derived models to inform patient care - out in EMBO Molecular Medicine.

A first in Canada step towards improved personalized #PrecisionMedicine

CBC: www.cbc.ca/player/play/...
Article: www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....
April 3, 2025 at 12:47 AM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Collecting my thoughts at the end of one of the worst days of my life...

At NIH, > 1300 people were RIFed. These range all across the board from institute directors to low level administrative staff.

Communication staff and procurement appear to be hardest hit as anticipated from the HHS plan

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April 2, 2025 at 12:17 AM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
March 27, 2025 at 10:23 AM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Congrats to lead author Doug and team on their new preprint, which describes a genome mining strategy to find non-canonical amino acid-based secondary metabolites outside of RiPP and NRPS pathways! Read more below: chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...
tRNA-Deacylase Directed Discovery of Biosynthetic Pathways
Amino acids are one of nature’s most privileged building blocks for generating molecular diversity on length-scales ranging from small molecules to proteins. While amino acid products arising from cer...
chemrxiv.org
March 23, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Excited to share this one! We developed an in vivo model for specific manipulation of transfer RNA acetylation and found it serves as a sentinel modification whose loss causes ribosome stalling and stress signaling. Implications for a genetic disorder and cancer.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Transfer RNA acetylation regulates in vivo mammalian stress signaling
An ancient tRNA modification is used by mammalian cells to coordinate protein translation and adaptive signaling.
www.science.org
March 20, 2025 at 1:42 AM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
Prof Amy Weeks, a Clinton, Massachusetts native 🫖, explains: funding cuts don’t just hurt labs—they hurt families seeking cures for fatal diseases & kids from Clinton like her who might grow up to find them.
@amyweeks.bsky.social

www.clintonitem.com/writes-cuts-...
March 14, 2025 at 5:06 PM
My contribution to the Science Homecoming project--I wrote to The Item in Clinton, MA about the impacts that cuts to science funding will have on our health, our economy, and the opportunities available to young people in Clinton www.clintonitem.com/writes-cuts-...

@sciencehomecoming.bsky.social
March 14, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
AOC: It is almost unthinkable why Senate Democrats would vote to to hand the few pieces of leverage that we have away for free when we've been sent here to protect social security, protect medicaid, and protect medicare.
March 14, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
I was that woman! I have frequently told the story of how Jeremy responded after my second NIH rejection. He said, “Whatever you do, don’t stop spending. If you run out of startup, we’ll find more money for you.” I didn’t need it in the end, but knowing he had my back was huge. Thank you!
Our first recruit struggled initially to succeed in obtaining NIH funding. But her science was/is terrific and we bridged her along. She subsequent received an HHMI appointment, and then substantial NIH funding. She is now a member of the National Academy and is the current department director

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March 9, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
#standupforscience Madison Wisconsin
March 7, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Amy Weeks
We demonstrate sensitive, real-time GEO-FM streaming of transcription and proteasomal degradation dynamics in single cells. Existing reporters can be converted into FM data streams measured in non-arbitrary units (ΔmHz) that are insensitive to photobleaching, fluorophore maturation , and intensity.
March 4, 2025 at 4:28 PM