It is very hard to understand the effects of disease mutations that are prevalent in intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDRs). In a Perspective published in the December 23, 2020 issue of Cell, a collaborative Toronto team from the groups of Julie Forman-Kay, Alan Moses and Steve Scherer put forward both general and specific hypotheses for how IDR mutations lead to pathology in complex diseases, particularly in autism spectrum […]
Apologies for the delay – this semester has been pretty hectic and it’s been a while since I’ve had the bandwidth to put one of these notes together.
We’ve come through the semester pretty well all things considered. All reports are that undergraduate and graduate teaching has gone as well as can be expected – thanks to the Alexes, Jen Haughton and Carrie Harber for their hard work keeping those ships […]
Our congratulations goes out to Professor Oliver Ernst, the recipient of the 2020 Konrad Adenauer Research Award.
The Humboldt Foundation’s Konrad Adenauer Research Award honours researchers from Canada whose fundamental discoveries and findings have helped shape their discipline beyond their immediate research area and whose personality and research have contributed to strengthening academic and cultural relations between Germany and Canada.
What if we told you that you have a brain not because of natural selection, but in spite of it?
In the latest issue of Cell, Professor Alex Palazzo and his collaborator, Eugene Koonin from the NIH, have advanced a new theory on how biological complexity evolves. Most scientists assume that novel genes evolve as a direct consequence of natural selection, but Palazzo and Koonin present evidence […]
Congratulations to Professor Karen Maxwell who was awarded the 2020 NSERC John C. Polanyi Award. She received this award for her pioneering work investigating how bacteria like Streptomyces fight of phages by producing small molecules. This breakthrough not only reveals new biology about bacterial-phage interactions, but it also opens up a new way to screen for drugs that could be useful for the treatment of human cancers and […]
Congratulations to Professor Alexio Muise who was awarded the Crohn’s and Colitis Canada 2020 Research Leadership Award. Professor Muise’s lab has been performing groundbreaking work into the genetic causes of Inflammatory Bowel Syndrome and has published several ground breaking studies in the past few years.
On Thursday October 22th Transcripts, in collaboration with Dnatured and the Biochem Department, is hosting an online Science Stand-Up Comedy Night. See the poster for details. 
Hot off the press: Nana Lee’s article on Virtual Connections published in the print edition of Canada’s national University Affairs, Fall 2020.
Hello all,
Welcome to the new graduate students!
I would like to start by congratulating and welcoming all who have signed on to our graduate program for 2020-21. I realize that this is a strange time to be starting graduate school but I would like to say on behalf of the entire department, that we’re delighted you’re here. Normally we would all be off at our departmental retreat at this time however […]
Message from the Chair, Justin Nodwell.
Hello all,
I hope that your returns (partial or otherwise) to lab work have gone as smoothly as possible. None of the ‘new normal’ is perfect and there are some nagging problems that are still being worked on at our various locations. But I think we all agree that it is good and necessary to have this work going again.
In the mean time here […]
In the latest CSMB Bulletin, Alex Palazzo and Trevor Moraes urge the Canadian Government to increase funding for basic research.
From the article:
Why must governments increase their support for science? Charities do support some science, but this tends to be in very focused areas and less exploratory in nature. As for the private sector, there is no incentive to engage in basic fundamental exploratory research, as it does not provide […]
In a new publication that was published in Nature Communications, the Stagljar lab describe a new technique, called Split Intein-Mediated Protein Ligation (SIMPL), where two test proteins are fused to two halves of intein, a protein that promotes “protein splicing”. When the two test proteins interact, the intein protein activates a splicing reaction, resulting in the fusion of the two test proteins. This technique can help to detect […]