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.
‘Tis the season and time for some holiday fun. First up is decorating the lab door. We decided to go a different direction this year; instead of all the cute Christmas themes we took a darker approach. We borrowed from the old myth of Krampus and St. Nicholas from Germany (at least we think that’s where it originated). Krampus goes around with St. Nicholas and beats children who have been bad and any kids that have been really bad will be tossed in his sack and stolen.
On Sunday, November 29th the Department booked the Clare Drake arena and hosted it’s first skating event. This event was in memory of Rick Poirier, a lab tech who passed away last year. Everyone was invited out to have some fun no matter their skating level. The hockey players took over one end of the ice for a pick up game, the rest of us took over the other end to practice our skills and just have a good time. Kelly brought her kids and they were thrilled to share the ice with so many adults.
It turns out we are losing our spare storage next door because we will finally be getting new neighbors. For the last few years we have been using the lab next door as spare storage but word has come from on high that Dr. Michael Hendzel will finally be moving into the Department. Dr. Hendzel has been cross appointed with the Dept. of Cell Biology for a while now and wanted to move his lab from the Cross Cancer to Medical Sciences. The lab has been empty so long we were starting to think no one liked us.
Halloween has come and gone with our usual department fun. The CBSA holds an annual pumpkin carving contest. It’s always fun to see people carve their first ever pumpkin, and it’s more fun to see what a bunch of scientist will come up with for designs.
Kelly also brought in a special Halloween treat for Brenda, our undergrad student who hopes to enter medicine. Brenda can now combine her candy eating and anatomy lessons. Guess she is ready for med school….
The Cell Biology Students Association hosted their annual Research Days on October 1st and 2nd. Dr. Heidi McBride (McGill University) was the invited keynote speaker this year and she was a big hit with everyone. Her talk was informative and she was very easy to chat with during the student lunch. Students also had the opportunity to participate in a Careers in Science Panel Discussion with panel members from the University, government and industry.
It has felt like a very long hard road to Azra but the work has paid off! Her first publication was accepted this week! We tried to give Azra the honor of popping the champange cork since it was her first paper but Ben just couldn’t help but jump in. Since the paper concludes work he started several years ago we decided the celebration is for him too. A paper in Journal of Cell Biology is a pretty good start for the lab!
Brenda has decided to join the lab for a portion of the summer. After a volunteering position in Brazil she came back to Edmonton to share her stories with us. Now we all have a sudden urge to make a trip to Brazil. Thank you to AIHS for providing the funding for Brenda’s summer position.
Biplab spent a large portion of the spring working on his candidacy and on July 22 he sat his exam. The lab is thrilled to announce Biplab successfully passed his candidacy exam and is now officially a PhD student.
Last month Kelly took Biplab and Judit to Edmonton’s Tattoo Show at Northlands. She figured it was time for them to learn more about the wonderful world of tattoos. Kelly tried hard to convince both Biplab and Judit to get their first tattoos but was unsuccessful. We even tried to use Judit’s dislike of washing test tubes to convince her by making a deal – we will create a lab tattoo and anyone who gets it will never have to wash test tubes again.
Summer is here and so are all the conferences. In the last few weeks there have been three different conferences lab members have participated in. The first meeting, the Canada Gairdner Symposium, occurred here at the University of Alberta and included speakers from around the world. Sadly Nobel Prize laureate Gunter Blobel was unable to attend due to illness. All three lab members, Judit, Azra and Biplab, presented poster at this symposium.
The lab would like to say congratulations to Brenda for winning a NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award.
To make things even better Judit has just returned from holidays bearing gifts, including a shot glass to help us toast Brenda’s success.
Sadly a change in Brenda’s plans means she will be unable to spend the summer in the lab or accept her NSERC award. However, we all hope she will join us again in September for another undergraduate project.
