I survived the 2025 EMBO protein quality control meeting - it was amazing despite a defective projector on day 1, and epileptic crisis on day 2, a black out in day 3, and we all got a shaky wake up call ~6am on day 5 by an earthquake… never a dull moment but most importantly great science

We ran over 200 eggaggregation experiments for Science Rendezvous - a blast!

Here’s a quick throwback to celebrate the last day of winter: curling with the lab!

Some of you will recognize this - I am done with our CIHR application. Just in time to start teaching a big course section ✌️

I enjoyed both @cherisirois.bsky.social presentation and conversation about the publishing world and Cell Press today

With the help of e@UBC our BMB and MSL postdocs organized this great 1/2 day Academia to Industry workshop with a focus on entrepreneurship today

Even though David Baker's presentation was online, it was rad and inspiring. I really enjoyed today's session on machine learning at the 2025 PepTalk & BioLogic Summit

In this case, the disease-associated mutation increases interaction with the DNAJA2 chaperone, which appear to be dispensable for the folding of the wild-type protein. This interaction delays the proteolysis of the mutant protein, potentially buffering its deleterious effects.

Using BioID, we identified chaperones, including the co-chaperone DNAJA2, that interact more with the unstable thiopurine S-methyltransferase (TPMT) variant than the wild type. DNAJA2 deletion accelerates degradation of the mutated TPMT but does not affect the wild-type protein

Many disease-associated mutations are missense mutations causing single amino acid changes that signal proteins for degradation. We surveyed 18 unstable variants from 13 cytosolic proteins and found that all but one are at least partially degraded via proteasome- and ubiquitin-dependent pathways.

Protein quality control is a tug-of-war between degradation machinery and chaperones that promote folding. Thrilled to see our latest manuscript is now published!
👇 Follow 🧵 for quick summary
journals.biologists.com/jcs/article-...

Congrats to Dane Sands in our lab for his Zymeworks Fellowships Award in Advanced Protein Therapeutics

Our lab sells them for 1/2 of the price in case you are interested

Shriya from our lab presented our work on temporal BioID at the @cnpn-org.bsky.social meeting today
It’s a great feeling when trainees do a better job at presenting their work than we could have done 🤩

Sahil presenting some of his bioID work at the 2024 CNPN
go #proteomics !

Ryan from our lab presenting his work @cnpn looking at yeast strains capable of producing more recombinant proteins. When we started doing #proteomics we actually found quite important differences between these strains

More here www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Snowflakes & Proteomics: the 2024 CNPN Fairmont fairytale… once upon a time there was a tiny single cell (Ljijana Pasa-Tolic), a mutated proteome (Matthew Berg from the Villen lab) and a nasty protease (Olivier Julien)…

Team work: making our new batch of competent cells (2.5 x 10^8) for next year of cloning