What the HEK293t?

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.

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Huge congratulations to Joachim Frank, Richard Henderson, and Jacques Dubochet

Today the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2017 prize in Chemistry was awarded to Joachim Frank, Richard Henderson, and Jacques Dubochet for "developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution." CryoEM is a truly transformative technology perfectly suited to study macromolecular machines. The Davis lab uses this technique regularly and we're excited to take advantage of MIT's recent investments in the space.

Check out this lovely flowchart of Joachim Frank's widely used approach to generate 3D electron density maps from 2D micrographs.

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New mass spectrometer installed

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. 

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Marvel at the glowing lights :)