Congratulations Rita!!

including: Ken Lau, Thea Tlsty, Gordon Mills, @tme-caf-ecm.bsky.social, Arthur Lander, @mokhalil.bsky.social, @lucaspelkmans.bsky.social, @josh-leonard.bsky.social,
@arjunraj.bsky.social, Matt Thomson, many more

pleasure to co-organize w/ @zevgartner.bsky.social, Laura Heiser, @ajitjohnson.com

Congratulations Ophir! Quite a past couple weeks for your group!

congrats to you and your group George!

thanks Priya! Sitting next to you trading puns for 4 years was formative:)

Hah! What a great pic. Missed opportunity by ACS.

Yes!! Congrats John!!

We like Aviatar because it does with 1 protein what used to require 2, in a modular manner that is straightforward to engineer.

Also, check out Dennis's recent preprint on BcLOV4, a naturally-evolved membrane-binding 'Aviatar' that inspired us to expand the concept to other compartments

We also developed a "universal" Aviatar that can localize to any GFP-tagged compartment using a weak nanobody, and we used it to localize to stress granules through endogenously-tagged G3BP1

Aviatar regulated actin polymerization at the membrane and revealed compartment-specific differences of RTK fragments commonly mislocalized in cancer

Aviatar can target any desired compartment for which a weak binder can be found. We show common targets: plasma membrane, endosomes, Golgi, ER, and microtubules.

In Aviatar (Avidity assisted targeting), a single light-sensitive protein translocates from the cytoplasm to an unmodified subcellular compartment. Light induces clustering, clustering turns a weak binder to a high-avidity assembly, and Aviatar flies to its target location.