April Newsletter 2022
Click here to read the full edition: Email newsletter – April 2022 – FINAL
Five Biochemistry Graduate Students win big at the Annual 2018 American Crystallographic Association meeting
Congratulations to graduate students: Matt McCallum, Andreea Gheorghita, and Thomas Bateman for winning the Pauling Poster Prizes and Ondrej Halgas and Natalie Bamford for winning the Taylor & Francis Biomolecular Crystallography Poster Prize and the Louis Delbaere Pauling Poster Prize, respectively, at the 2018 American Crystallographic Association (ACA) meeting held at the Sheraton Hotel, Toronto, July 22-26.
A special congratulations to Andreea Gheorghita for also winning the inaugural ACA Three minute thesis competition.
The 66th Annual Conference of the Canadian Society of Microbiologists – a huge success!
On June 12-15, the 66th annual Canadian Society of Microbiologists led by co-chairs Trevor Moraes and Alex Ensminger was held at the University of Toronto hosted for the first time in over 30 years. CSM2016 was a resounding success with over 525 registrants the most ever recorded at a CSM conference. The conference was held on campus with >45 talks in MSB and >300 posters in Hart […]
Moraes lab identify a novel protein (Slam) required for the proper display of virulence factors in bacteria
In a paper published online on Feb 29, 2016 in Nature Microbiology, the Moraes lab investigated the transport of surface lipoproteins (SLPs) in Neisseria and discovered a key component of the transport process called SLAM.
Bacterial pathogens that cause gonorrhea and meningitis have developed a number of virulence factors to survive inside our body. One of […]
Nature News and Views Article by Moraes and Reithmeier
Trevor Moraes and Reinhart Reithmeier discuss SLC26 transporters in a News & Views article published in the October 6, 2015 issue of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology entitled “ Solute Carriers Keep on Rockin’ ”. The 400 members of the human solute carriers (SLC) remain among the most poorly characterized of human gene families, although they are essential for nutrient uptake, waste removal and ion transport. Furthermore, mutations in the genes […]
Brandon Sit and the Moraes Lab publish article in PLoS Pathogens
In this PLoS Pathogens article (Sit et al.), undergraduate student Brandon Sit together with other members of the Moraes Lab used X-ray crystallography and additional biochemical and functional approaches to illustrate that AfuABC binds and transports sugar-phosphates such as glucose-6-phosphate (G6P) across the Gram negative bacterial membrane. In collaboration with the Vallance lab (at UBC) they went on to show that AfuABC is required by enteric pathogens to effectively transmit […]
Charles Calmettes and other members of the Moraes, Pomès, and Gray-Owen labs publish paper in Nature Communications
The conserved outer-membrane zinc transporter ZnuD is utilized by bacteria to overcome nutritional restriction imposed by the host organism during infection. In this Nature Communications paper (Calmettes et al.), Post doctoral fellow Dr. Charles Calmettes and other members of the Moraes Lab, Pomès Lab and Gray-Owen lab demonstrate that ZnuD is required for efficient systemic infections by the causative agent of bacterial meningitis, Neisseria meningitidis. They combined X-ray crystallography […]
Trevor Moraes Awarded Tier 2 Canada Research Chair
Research in the Moraes Lab examines protein and ion translocation across bacterial membranes. In particular, Dr. Moraes dissects the components of these pathways examining their interactions in molecular detail. Biochemical tools such as X-ray crystallography provide atomic resolution 3D-models of the proteins, while surface plasmon resonance, isothermal calorimetry or bio-layer interferometry are used to determine kinetic parameters and validate models that describe the mechanism of action. These membrane proteins function […]