Cycling achievement unlocked: Strava “excluding” my ride as its rubbish AI can’t believe I could ride this fast 😂

Or why Nocardia harbour massive multi-domain proteins that may be over 50,000 AAs (5.6 MDa!) in some cases with no known function for the organism? Bigger than titin and PKZillas. Should stop this procrastination 😅

It always pleases me to see how little we know. I can pick a random ~700 AA protein from a bacterial genome and it has no conserved domains and no characterised structural homologues, yet there are >1000 homologues across diverse Gram+ and Gram- bacteria.

Returning home after a fun couple of days in London at the RSC Chemical Biology Symposium and then the Chemical Biology Interface Council meeting. Excellent talks and always a joy to return to Burlington House @rsc.org

Happy Tuesday to everyone apart from whoever approved this awful design! Annoys me every time I use Greater Anglia.

Trying to find an experiment we could actually do this evening and spotted “make your own telephone”. Was looking promising until I realised we were all out of bladders 😂

Harmless Scientific Experiments for Boys (the introduction does at least acknowledge that girls can also use the book) including such “harmless” experiments as making gas from coal, and a DIY thermometer involving your own glass blowing and “a very small quantity of mercury” 🤔

Returning to the UK after a great trip to beautiful Gent. Alway a pleasure to hear about the natural products research happening there 😊 Also got to dress up in a gown for the first time in years! Now to the JIC Mol Micro Xmas lunch to “recover” after last night’s Belgian beers 😂

Congratulations to Nathan Byrne for passing his PhD viva 🍾 Thanks to @barriewilks.bsky.social and Chris Corre for agreeing to be examiners too!

The similarity of the BGC to the actinonin and matlystatin BGCs motivated us to reinvestigate and ultimately revise the structure of lydiamycin, while a cluster-situated peptide deformylase led us to identification of the molecular target.
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