Sam Whedon is awarded a full scholarship to attend the Genetic Code Expansion Workshop at Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR. Huge thanks go out to Prof. Ryan Mehl and his team for organizing the workshop and also funding Sam’s participation! We are exploring the world of synthetic chemical biology- one stop codon at a time.

Congratulations Dr. Caroline E. Weller! Off to her next adventure in sunny (?) San Fran.

Sam Whedon wins a Travel Award to the American Peptide Society Conference in Whistler, British Columbia, to present his work on selenocysteine-based probes for deubiquitylating enzymes.

Congratulations, Sam!

A cyclic peptide inhibitor bound to the enzyme Trypsin

 

Patrick’s first paper is accepted for publication in JACS. Congrats Patrick and Caroline! A MEGA success indeed.

 

Artwork from  O’Reilly Science Art.

Esha Upadhyay

Calvin Jon Leonen

Lorena Lea Perkins

Join the group as first year graduate students. Welcome folks! Lorena and Calvin worked with us over the Summer Quarter and Esha worked with Abhinav in the Fall Quarter before officially joining the lab.

Abhinav heads to Harvard Medical School to postdoc with Professor Yang Shi. He will be missed and we wish him many snowy Boston winters!

The department votes to promote C.C. to the rank of Associate Professor with Tenure. The official announcement from UW will be in September 2017 so don’t hold your breath anyone.

Lab celebrates in style with chocolate cake, nachos and beer at the College Inn.

Thanks to everyone who contributed toward the many projects we have delved in over the years. Special thanks to the Rathod, Maly, Gelb, Zheng, Klevit, Ong, Turecek, and Chiu labs at UW Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Pharmacology, for their strong support of our program. To paraphrase the Wonder Years- “we get by with a little help from our friends”.

July, 2011: Our youngest member, Adam Miller Chatterjee, arrives in Seattle.

August, 2011: AD’s review is published in ACS Chem. Biol.

August, 2011: Hike to Denny Creek.

November, 2011: CC presents our work at Pacific Lutheran University.

January, 2012: KS is accepted for graduate school at UW Chemistry.

January, 2012: CC presents our work in the Department of Biochemistry at Iowa State University.

February, 2012: Markandeya Nagula (Mark) joins us from IICT Hyderabad.

Februar, 2012: DS presents our work at the Volcano Conference in Pack National Forrest. (Talk and poster)

March, 2012: Our first second year exam- congratulations AD!

March, 2012: AD’s paper with the Pratt Lab at USC is published in J. Am. Chem. Soc.

June, 2012: AD attends a workshop on Analytical Ultracentrifugation in Indianapolis.

June, 2012: CC leads the discussion on Chemical Proteomics at the Bioorganic Chemistry Gordon Research Conference

June, 2012: MP presents our work at the 67th ACS Northwest Regional Meeting (Talk)

August, 2012: The group heads to Lake Washington on a canoeing trip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October, 2012: CC presents our work to the students and faculty of Seattle University.

October, 2012: CW talks about her work at the 23rd Rocky Mountain Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Westminster, CO.

December, 2012: Group Holiday Party at la casa de Adam. Secret Santa brings MP a portable pint glass and Ryan’s UNO is stolen- darn! CW is inspired by Ben Franklin and AD shares his costco candy with the crowd. Who knew that A-B-C-D-E-F-G-… was a karaoke song in the Philippines, or that pani puri is found in the pac northwest!

January, 2013: CC presents our work at the annual BPSD/MBTG retreat at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

January, 2013: Sam Whedon joins our team. Welcome Sam!

February, 2013: Denis’ manuscript is accepted at JACS. Thanks to AB for some killer experiments. Also, Meg tames the GDH coupled-assay for ammonia. Exciting times indeed!

February, 2013: The team heads to the Volcano Conference in Chemical Biology in Pack National Forest at the base of Mt. Rainier. AB, Meg and Caroline give talks.

March, 2013: Caroline passes her second year exam. Congrats!

March, 2013: Ms. Deborah Alan-LaZerte from Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle is awarded a Partners in Science Grant by the M.J. Murdock Trust to work with us over the summers of 2013 and 2014. Fun times ahead!

March, 2013: Vincent wins a Mary Gates Research Scholarship. Congrats!

March, 2013: Last second year exam for this year. All done Meagan!

March, 2013: Caroline wins an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Congrats!

April, 2013: Team Vincy (in honor of Vincent’s 21^st birthday) ties for second place out of 19 teams at Schultzy’s trivia night. Who needs Google, we have Sam!

June, 2013: CC talks about our work on the roles for SUMOylated chromatin at the Bioorganic GRC.

June, 2013: Jessica Huang joins Meg’s team Pup.

June-Aug, 2013: We welcome several new folks to the lab this summer, Lauren Wugalter (UW Chemistry Early-bird Research Awardee), Johsua Feng (UW Amgen Fellow), Debbie Alan-LaZerte (MJ Murdock Grant Awardee), and Brady Rohrig (US Army Veteran).

September, 2013: CC talks about our work at Macalester, St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges in Minnesota. Christine McCreary (UW Freshman) joins the team.

October, 2013: Dr. Francis Valiyaveetil visits us from Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. Semisynthesis of potassium channels leads to interesting discoveries about their function.

December, 2013: We welcome several new folks to the lab- Nick Senger, Ian Eustis and Marty Roskoff join our team.

January, 2014: CC talks about our work in the Department of Chemistry at Presidency University (formerly Presidency College) in Kolkata (Calcutta). Thanks to Dr. Gandhi Kumar Kar for hosting the visit!

February, 2014: CC talks about our work in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Thanks to Dr. James Chambers for hosting the visit! Sam and Caroline share their stories at the Volcano Research Conference. Then Sam proceed to saves a tree!

 

March, 2014: CC talks about our work at the Young Investigators in Medicinal Chemistry Symposium at the 247th ACS National Convention in Dallas, Texas. This is followed by at a talk at Biochemistry and Biophysics at Texas A&M. Thanks to Dr. Thomas Prisinzano and Dr. Jean-Philippe Pellois for their generosity! CC also visit Washington State University in Pullman, WA. Thanks to Dr. Phil Garner for hosting the visit!

Viewer’s left to right: Dr. Jae-Hyun Cho (Biomolecular NMR), Dr. Steve Lockless (Potassium ion-channels), Dr. CC (Histone modifications), Dr. Jean-Philippe Pellois (Intracellular protein delivery).

April, 2014: Sam passes his second year exam with flying colors! Abhinav uses his Departmental Travel Award to visit IIT Bombay and V.G. Vaze College in India, where he presents his research on chromatin biophysics. Abhinav also wins a Graduate School Travel Award to partially fund his trip to the Chromatin Gordon Conference in June 2014. Caroline’s paper is accepted in 2 days at ChemBioChem, this is a new record for the lab!

May, 2014: Meg presents her work on the deamidase of Pup to the department. Jessica presents her work with Meg at the Mary Gates Undergraduate Research Symposium.

June, 2014: We welcome Patrick Shelton to the lab. Patrick obtained his B.S. and M.S. in Organic Chemistry, with Prof. Jim Vyvyan, from Western Washington University.

July, 2014: We welcome Janella Bermudez an Amgen summer fellow to the lab. Janella is a rising junior at Gonzaga University and will be working with Sam Whedon to clone ultrafast inteins.

August, 2014: Jessica and Vincent have graduated with flying colors. We wish them the best of luck with Medical School interviews! Janella presents her work with Sam at the Amgen Scholars Oral Presentations. CC successfully repeats his experiment from 3 years ago and is now the proud parent of Ms. Monica Miller Chatterjee. No plans of n=3 for this experiment!

September, 2014: Caroline passes her general exam with great aplomb. Congratulations!

October, 2014: CC heads to D.C. to sit in on the NIH SBCB review panel. He also visits BC, Brandeis and Tufts to talk about our work. Thanks to Dr. Eranthie Weerapana, Dr. Isaac Krauss and Dr. Rebecca Scheck for hosting the visits! Nick heads to Bishop Blanchet High School to talk about protein post-translational modifications and the use of fluorescent proteins in neuroscience (a technique called Brainbow).

November, 2014: CC talks about our work at UW Pharmacology. Thanks to Dr. Richard Gardner for the kind invite. Caroline continues to rack up the awards- she wins a Travel Award from our Dept. to visit her alma mater the University of Colorado. Sam wins a Department of Chemistry Graduate Student Merit Award.

December, 2014: CC talks about our work at Oregon Health Sciences University. Thanks to Dr. Francis Valiyaveetil for the kind invitation. Ms. Hailun Wang, a rising sophomore joins the lab to work on nucleosome microfluidics with the Chiu lab.

January, 2015: We welcome Priscilla Kwong to the lab. Priscilla is an undergraduate at UW majoring in Biochemistry. She will be working with Sam and Nick on protein ubiquitylation.

Feb-March-April, 2015: Sam is awarded the Irving and Mildred Shain Endowed Fellowship in Chemistry. Nick Senger passes his second year exam- congrats Nick! Lloyd joins the lab to work with Abhinav on nucleosome sorting. Peng Gang joins the lab.

 

May, 2015: CC talks about our work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Dr. Indraneel Ghosh visits us from the University of Arizona.

June, 2015: Caroline presents her latest discovery at the Chemical Protein Synthesis meeting in St. Augustine, Florida. This is the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States (wikipedia tells us so).

July, 2015: Ian’s paper is accepted at Analytical Biochemistry. Alex Santiago joins us for the summer.

August, 2015: The following experiment was performed by a trained professional desperate to clean up his His₆-MBP-Usp15. Do not try this at home!

(Note the helical arrangement of columns)

March, 2016: Christa defends her M.S. thesis. She will head to Ohio to join the Army Research Labs. We will miss her and wish her all the best. Our country is in great hands!

Our friend Mary O’Reilly who is the founder of O’Reilly Science Art, presents us with a cool graphic depicting Abhinav’s latest work. Yup, she is that good!