MACARA LAB NEWS!
Feb 16, 2009: Voula Mili has been selected as a speaker in the Future Leaders Special Symposium at the AACR 100th Annual Meeting, April 18 - 22, 2009 in Denver, CO. Congratulations Voula!
April 2009: Huaye Zhang has won a K99 transition award to continue her work on the role of polarity proteins in dendritic spine morphogenesis. Congratulations Huaye!
April 28, 2009: Voula has also been awarded a K99 transition award from the NCI, for her work on APC-dependent mRNA localization. And JoAnne Montalbano has won an F32 postdoctoral training fellowship from the NCI. Awesome, dudes!
May 27, 2009: Ian co-chairs ESF-EMBO conference in Spain on Cell Polarity and Vesicle Traffic.
June 15, 2009: Luke Martin McCaffrey's paper on the role of PAR3 in mammary gland morphogenesis was selected for the cover picture of Genes & Dev! Check it out!!
July 21: 2nd ANNUAL LAB OLYMPICS !! Click here for more pictures!
In an exciting demonstration of scientific prowess, members of the Macara lab competed in the second annual Lab Olympics. The overall results were a close match between all three teams. In the Scavenger Hunt, Team 2, under the capable guidance of team captain Voula, found all five items in a stunning 5 minutes and 56 seconds.
Once again Ian showed his speed in the gel loading section of the relay, although he left a little to be desired in terms of accuracy, and incurred a ten second penalty for an underloaded well. Building on the lead, Sarah “I-can-load-tips-with-my-eyes-shut” Tweedt filled her five pipet boxes in just seconds, passing the lab coat to Christine who dazzled the crowd with her water bottle filling speed. Rounding out Team 1, JoAnne maintained the lead with her speedy labeling and aliquoting the ampicillin. Right behind Ian, Yi Hao and Huaye were neck-and-neck finishing the gel loading. The battle for second place continued with Voula completing the tip box loading just ahead of Team 3’s Tim. At the aliquoting station Hide and Jeong-Yoon overtook Team 2’s Yi Qin by a few seconds as she favored accuracy and equalized the volumes between the bottles. Madhura blasted through the ampicillin aliquots and kept Team 2 alive going into the shooting range. With his rapid load-and-fire technique, Janusz shot out a number of tips, but was unable to sink the third one – possibly due to differences in prevailing winds between Virginia and his training grounds in Poland.
In the Measurements contest, Team 1 had the magic touch, and correctly determined the temperature of the bucket of water. Team 2 dominated in estimating volumes and masses, while Team 3 awed the crowd by adjusting the pH of water to within 3/5 of a pH unit of 7.4.
