Manu Ben-Johny
manubenjohny.bsky.social
Manu Ben-Johny
@manubenjohny.bsky.social
Ion channels, Ca2+, Biophysics, Engineer, Dad. Assistant Professor at Columbia
Reposted by Manu Ben-Johny
Happy to share a new preprint from the Clarke & Vallese (@fravallese.bsky.social) labs reporting #cryoem structures of two RBC stomatin complexes – with AQP1 & UT-B - continuing the SPFH theme from our recent vault preprint! This was a fun one and has been cooking for a while - read on for more! ⬇️
August 30, 2025 at 2:11 PM
Very excited to share our most recent work on using de novo design to custom engineer a small peptide that can restore proper sodium channel function in disease … to be able to “write” proteins to do whatever we want them to do, is just remarkable …
August 20, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Very excited to share our latest work on ways to tune S-Palmitoylation of proteins! We engineered Abhd17 enzymes to be chemically/optically activated. We can then use this to inhibit palmitoylation of specific proteins, many possibilities … Check it out!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Engineered depalmitoylases enable selective manipulation of protein localization and function - Nature Communications
Dynamic palmitoylation modulates protein localization and function. Here, Jayaraman et al develop a toolkit of engineered depalmitoylases to manipulate protein function with spatial, temporal, and substrate specificity.
www.nature.com
April 14, 2025 at 8:26 PM