Festivus came early to the Davis lab this year! New toys include large shaking incubators, an expanded cell culture facility and the installation of our new Bio-Rad FPLC.
Using these instruments, we will purify a series of autophagy-related proteins. Using these purified components, we can perform experiments to understand individual proteins fold, how they assemble into enormous molecular machines, and, eventually, how these assembled complexes enable autophagy. Exciting days ahead!
More progress on the Davis lab renovations! Reps from Thermo just installed a stack of new incubators (pretty, right?), which we will use to culture mammalian cell lines including HEK293t. These studies are aimed at determining both the identity of, and the rate at which cellular substrates are degraded via autophagy. With this assay in hand, we hope to eventually measure how mutations, environmental stress, or other perturbations affect the cell's ability to perform autophagy. See our research page for more info.
Our new Thermo Q-Exactive HF-X mass spectrometer is installed and operational!
This instrument is the most advanced mass spectrometer in the Q-exactive line released to date and features an improved high capacity transfer tube allowing for exquisite sensitivity as well as an ultra-high field orbitrap analyzer, which doubles the speed (up to 40 Hz) and resolution (up to 240,000 resolving power) of the instrument.
Marvel at the glowing lights :)