Ayaz Najafov appointed Assistant Professor in UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas

Published today in Acta Neuropathologica! New paper from the Sammler lab: 1-4% of the estimated 10 million cases of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are caused by genetic changes in the LRRK2 kinase. Unravelling the signalling and regulatory network of LRRK2 is a major focus of research in the MRC PPU. …more

Congratulations to Jenny van Asbeck - van der Wijst with a new step in her career as CEO of the mRNA start-up Mercurna, located in the Netherlands.

Taran Khanam, an MRC-funded post-doctoral researcher in John Rouse’s lab in the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, has been awarded the prize for the best flash talk given at the International Joint Course on Post Transcriptional Gene Regulation and Genome Instability. …more

Published today: review article from Nicola Darling and Philip Cohen providing an overview of current knowledge about a family of kinases called Salt-Inducible Kinases (SIKs), with a focus on their physiological roles and how they are regulated. …more

I have worked in several research labs before, but I have never had the opportunity to speak and collaborate with people diagnosed with the condition that I am researching. That is, until now, when I had the privilege to speak with Marc van Grieken and Brendan Hawdon, both committee members of the Dundee Research Interest Group (DRIG).

The MRC PPU’s collaboration with the MRC CVR in Glasgow to generate a SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus Toolkit has yielded its second important publication.

Giulia Saredi, a postdoctoral researcher in John Rouse’s group, has been awarded a SULSA Early Career Researcher Development funding grant. Giulia’s research proposal relates to her project ‘Faithful chromatin maintenance and germline integrity in C. elegans’. SULSA, the Scottish University Life Sciences Alliance, recently set up this award to support postdocs in exploring their own independent research. The award covers reagents, and collaboration and travel expenses.

Satpal Virdee and his research group in the MRC PPU have uncovered a striking new role for a family of enzymes in a vital pathway that regulates cell activity and underpins our understanding of health and disease - the result of nearly a decade of collective and sustained scientific efforts to understand the ubiquitin pathway. 

Wnt signalling pathway is fundamental during development but it’s overactivity drives many cancers, particularly colorectal cancers (CRCs). New research led by Karen Dunbar (postdoctoral fellow in Sapkota lab) has uncovered FAM83F as a novel mediator of the Wnt signalling pathway. Through a collaboration with Smith lab (The Francis Crick Institute), the team were able to demonstrate that FAM83F was critical in driving Wnt signalling in both Xenopus embryos and many different cancer cell lines.