Finally! We have a FANCM:RMI inhibitor that is cell active and specifically kills ALT+ cancer cells 🎯 @yuhenglau.bsky.social + my labs just published the first cell-active peptide inhibitors of this critical target in 10-15% of cancers. doi.org/10.1021/acs....

Reprogramming encapsulins into modular carbon-fixing nanocompartments @natcomms.nature.com by @taylorszyszka.bsky.social et al from @yuhenglau.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Led by @taylorszyszka.bsky.social + Dav, the first part of a big effort to make simple CO2-fixing cages is out @natcomms.nature.com 🦠➡️🌻 Encapsulation is one step towards keeping Rubisco focused on its very important job... Paper: doi.org/10.1038/s414... Conversation article: doi.org/10.64628/AA.n5

Centre researchers have created tiny compartments to help supercharge photosynthesis, potentially boosting wheat and rice yields while slashing water and nitrogen use. 🌾⬆️ Read the story: www.coesb.com.au/superchargin... 📷: Davin S Wijaya at ANU @taylorszyszka.bsky.social

Better photosynthesis could boost crop yields by up to 60% – and a tiny box made of proteins could help.

💥🛟Wow cyclic peptides are cool! So excited to share a new publication on "Potent Cyclic Peptide Inhibitors Disrupt the FANCM–RMI Interaction". Work led by @yuhenglau.bsky.social to which we contributed structures and ideas. The top hits mimic native MM2...but in reverse! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Our paper on in vitro assembly and packaging of encapsulin protein cages is now accepted in @angewandtechemie.bsky.social 🥳 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... Congrats @taylorszyszka.bsky.social for leading the charge, along with all our team members and collaborators

We're hiring!🚨Our lab is looking for two new postdocs for our drug discovery program: 1) Synthetic/Med Chem (small molecule hit-to-lead)🧪 usyd.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USYD_E... 2) Chemical Biology (peptide inhibitors)🦠 usyd.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USYD_E... Pls spread the word!🙏

🎉👏 Congratulations to Associate Investigator, A/Prof Yu Heng Lau @yuhenglau.bsky.social from our #USyd node on receiving an #NHMRC Investigator Grant! He has been awarded $1.6 million for his project "Developing targeted therapies for gliomas by peptide-assisted fragment optimisation." 🧠💊

Maybe with all that is going on in the states no one noticed, but in the Netherlands the university of Twente has fired 46 people from the chem department. One of them is Jeroen Cornelissen. A giant in the field #chemsky www.utoday.nl/news/75215/p...

Light-ning Talks #LorneProteins2025 Taylor Szyszka Engineering carbon-fixing protein cages. Carboxysomes are great, but encapsulins can assemble a uniform cage around any target tagged with a cargo peptide at C term. 42 nm across. Carboxysome mimic with encapsulin? Encapsulating rubisco.

Amazing work from Farren Isaacs team at Yale - reducing E.coli's genetic code down to only using a single stop codon. A 62 codon GRO with lots of potential for applications. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We have PhD scholarships @sydneyuni.bsky.social School of Chemistry available to work on a range of drug discovery and chemical biology projects in my lab, applications close Feb 21 Please let any potentially interested candidates know! www.sydney.edu.au/scholarships...

Big crowd to see Prof Sir Shankar Balasubramanian give the 2025 Cornforth Lecture @sydneyuni.bsky.social School of Chemistry. Very happy for all the students who have seen his science in my undergraduate lectures... They finally get to see him now in action for real! 🧬

The Physical Virology meeting is back! now under the EMBO|FEBS umbrella. Very excited to go, happy to be part of it. meetings.embo.org/event/25-phy...

Looking forward to this! meetings.embo.org/event/25-phy...

Three more days left for Early Bird Registration for the Lorne Protein Conference 2025! www.lorneproteins.org

Had such a wonderful time at #Coesb2024! Got to meet like minded synthetic biologists and learn about their successes and challenges. And huge thanks to @ARC_CoESB for an award for Outreach Excellence!

Shouting out some super cool work by my good friend and Chemistry colleague Shelley Wickham and her amazing team @sydneyuni.bsky.social #chemsky DNA origami voxels configured into anything 🦕🇦🇺 you name it, even 3D or dynamic, they'll build it Out in Science Robotics www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

My first ever Bluesky post is a new #preprint alert! What if we could put *anything* into a protein cage? Our new in vitro encapsulin assembly system is esay to use and enables the pacakging of protein and synthetic cargo! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

As Lorne Protein Meeting approaches its 50th anniversary we’re excited to welcome the fantastic speakers coming in 2025 to celebrate. www.lorneproteins.org/speakers2025

Very excited to share our new pre-print! We’ve developed a new way to put any type of cargo (biological or synthetic) into protein cages! All in-vitro! This enables massively scalable in vitro packaging technology for multiple lucrative applications. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Long time lurker, first time poster... announcing our latest preprint on encapsulin protein cages! We can now assemble them beautifully in vitro, without the ugly defects you get using acid/base or denaturants. This lets us put any synthetic cargo into these cages. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...