Congrats to Azra, Carlas, and Carina for having their work selected for a special online collection of articles related to mRNA Processing in Health and Disease by JCB Board member Jens Lykke-Andersen. The complete collection of articles can be found here.
We have had some exciting additions to the lab in 2017 so far. The first being a dual-camera WF/ Confocal/TIRF microscope system,which is rapidly creating TBs of data and a lot of amazing images.
The second addition, arguably as important, is a new PhD student, Arvind Arul Nambi Rajan, from the BMCDB graduate group. Arvind is a recent graduate from the University of the Pacific who is seeking to learn all things RNA and budding yeast. Welcome Arvind!
Members of the Montpetit lab spent an fun filled weekend at Fallen Leaf Lake in Tahoe drinking up the science, nature, and many other things. Ben and Biplab were there with PhD rotation students Liz, Cindy, and Taylor who we are excited to have with us.
Although the lab is spread across North America (Davis, Edmonton, and Montreal), we still want to celebrate the publication of Bip’s paper in Molecular Biology of the Cell. We will be sure to have a celebratory drink on his behalf!
The Montpetit Lab has moved to the University of California at Davis. In July 2016, Ben will be starting his new position as Assistant Professor in the Viticulture and Enology Department at UC Davis and will continue to be a part of the University of Alberta in the Cell Biology Department as Adjunct Professor. Rachel Montpetit has been hired as the new lab manager and will help Ben set up the lab space in the Robert Mondavi Institute before the arrival of Biplab and Azra in September.
As the winter term comes to a close things are changing in the Montpetit Lab. Our Post-doc Judit is finished her time in our lab and heading to the UK. We will miss her and her beautiful protein purifications and wish her all the best in the future.
Biplab is arranging to spend 2 months at the University of Montreal to learn some new techniques in bioinformatics (whatever that might mean…) from Dr. Sebastian Pechmann. He will be heading out sometime in June if all plans proceed as expected.
The university closes between Christmas and New Year’s which gave us all a nice break. And while we may have stopped by work a few times during that closure we did slow down. But now the New Year has started and we are back at it full time. To ease the pain of returning to work full time we celebrated Judit’s paper with some champagne. Nothing like the bang of a champagne cork to celebrate a new paper and a New Year.
Congratulations Ben and Judit!
Azra and Ben attended the ASCB’s annual meeting last week. Despite all the pictures we just know they spent most of their time indoors listening to some fantastic scientific talks! Azra discovered that presenting a poster and giving a talk in the same day is exhausting and means you spend the entire day talking! We’re not sure she will ever sign up to do that again but she managed it very well at ASCB. The next big challenge for Azra will be her candidacy exam, but after answering so many questions at ASCB she should be well prepared.
Congratulations to Judit and Ben on having a paper accepted to the Journal of Molecular Biology!
Pi release limits the intrinsic and RNA-stimulated ATPase cycles of DEAD-box protein 5 (Dbp5). Emily V. Wong, Wenxiang Cao, Judit Vörös, Monique Merchant, Yorgo Modis, David D. Hackney, Ben Montpetit, Enrique M. De La Cruz. Journal of Molecular Biology 2015. Accepted.
Azra is doing a major happy dance these days. Her first paper is finally coming out!!! The Journal of Cell Biology will be publishing her paper in Volume 211, Number 6 on Dec. 21, 2015. As an added bonus the authors have been singled out for a special “in focus” interview which will also be in the journal. The lab is starting to get use to hearing the odd shriek of joy from Azra’s bench as she reviews the final drafts of her paper before publication.
