News
2024
March
Nick Razo also joins that lab as a graduate student! Nick is in the Biophysics, Biochemistry, and Structural Biology (BBSB) program and will be working on new physical framework for describing uncertainty in disordered systems. Welcome Nick!
Dan win’s the 2023 MilliporeSigma Fellowship! This Fellowship is awarded to an outstanding senior in the area of biochemistry and molecular biophysics. MilliporeSigma, created the fellowship in 1958 as a gift to the Department in memory of Dr. Gerty Cori. Dr. Cori and her husband, Dr. Carl Cori, performed research in the Department of Biological Chemistry. Congratulations Dan!!!
Alex gave a talk at the Siteman Cancer Center Mechanism of Cancer Biology Program (MCBP) annual retreat. Thanks so much to Sheila Stewart and Greg Longmore for the invitation to speak!
Alex has recieved an NSF CAREER award to support the lab’s work on the evolution of disordered protein regions! Thanks so much to the NSF for generous and continued support!
February
Emery receives a notice of award (NOA) for his NIGMS-funded F32! Huge congrats to Emery for this major milestone!
Jeff wins a D.E. Shaw Research Fellowship! Congratulations Jeff!
Borna, Jeff, Emery, Jhullian and Alex lab attended the Biophysical Society Meeting in Philadelphia! Borna presented a poster on his enhanced sampling work, Jeff presented a flashtalk and a poster on the ALBATROSS paper, Emery gave a flash talk and presented a poster on his RNA binding simulation work, and Jhullian gave a talk on this SARS CoV-2 N protein:RNA interaction work. Jeff was also awarded a travel award for the meeting - congrats Jeff!
Jeff won a Student Research Achievement Award (SRAA) at the 2024 Biophysical Society Meeting! Congratulations Jeff!
Alex wins the 2024 Dean’s Impact Award. The Dean’s Impact Awards recognize faculty who have demonstrated enduring commitment to advancing the careers of others through exceptional mentorship and/or sponsorship of trainees, clinicians, educators, and researchers.
JANUARY
Emery co-chaired the Protein Folding Dynamics Gordon Research Conference. This two-day meeting brought together an electric mix of scientists working on various aspects of protein biophysics and was by all accounts a huge success! Congratulations Emery!
Nick Razo joins the lab for a rotation! Nick is in the Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology program, and joins us having completed two years of research with Ralph Damiano after an undergraduate degree in Physics from Missouri University of Science and Technology. He’ll be working on deep learning, simulations of BRCA1, and new ways to represent uncertainty in IDRs. Welcome Nick!
2023
DECEMBER
Graduate student Garrett Ginell defended his thesis! As the third student to graduate from the lab, Garrett’s thesis work focussed on understanding the chemical principles that underlie how disordered regions interact with themselves and other biomolecules. Garrett will be continuing with a short postdoc to wrap up the final part of his thesis work. Congratulations, Dr. Ginell!!
Alex spoke at the Association of Molecular Modellers of Australasia Annual Meeting, held in Wollongong, NSW. Thanks so much to friend of the lab Davide Mercadante for the kind invitation to speak and all of the hospitality. No kangaroos, though.
Garrett’s first-author review in Trends in Biochemical Sciences gets the cover! Congrats to Garrett and thanks – as always – to long-term lab besties Shahar Sukenik and David Moses.
November
The lab held it's first joint lab retreat with the Boeynaems lab! Steven and five of his students and postdocs braved the journey from Houston to St. Louis to enable an integrative joint retreat that included small team building, small group discussions, new project pitches, and a highly competitive game of table tennis. Thanks so much to Steven, Olivia, Paulo, Pilar, Guo-Teng and Sophie for an incredible few days of science, teambuilding, and table tennis.
Caelan Miller joins the lab for a rotation! Caelan is in the Molecular Microbiology and Microbial Pathogenesis program, and joins us having completed two years of research with Lucia Strader at Duke University after an undergraduate degree at the greatest university in the world (WashU). He’ll be working on bioinformatics analysis of IDRs across evolution. Welcome Caelan!
The lab held its first-ever lab retreat - two days in rural Illinois where we discussed lab direction, big open questions, and our underlying scientific assumptions. Science was accompanied by team cooking and fireside songs, fueled by a remarkable volume of bread, cheese, and charcuterie.
OCTOBER
We are incredibly proud as original Holehouse lab member Shubhanjali “Shubh” Minhas attends her whitecoat ceremony as she enters medical school at Washington University Schol of Medicine. Congratulations Shubh!!!!
Jeff and Emery presented posters at the Gibbs Biothermodynamics Conference! Emery also played an essential role as the “ground organizing crew” and chairing a session!
The lab has been awarded an NIH New Innovator Award (DP2)!!! This grant will fund the lab’s work understanding disordered regions in yeast and was masterminded by Ryan and Stephen! This is a huge accomplishment recognizing all the hard work by everyone in the lab over the last three years! Read more about this from the WashU press release and congratulations to all the other winners!
Alex spoke at the “Biological condensates: cellular mechanisms governed by phase transitions” workshop at the Isaac Newton Insitute in Cambridge on the lab’s work predicting ensemble behavior and intermolecular interactions directly from the sequence (presenting work done by Jeff, Garrett, and Jhullian). Thanks so much to Buddho Chakrabarti, Frank Jülicher, and Simon Alberti for the kind invitation to speak.
Aidan wins Best Poster at the Plant and Microbial Biosciences (PMB) graduate program retreat! Congrats Aidan!
Jackie speaks at brings biophysics to the age-old understanding of Neurospora biology at the 2023 Neurospora meeting! Congrats Jackie!
Ramiz’s undergraduate work with the Kriwacki lab is published in Nature Communications! Congrats Ramiz (et al!).
SEPTEMBER
Aidan is awarded a Marine Biology Lab (MBL) post-course research award to travel to Princeton for work with Cliff Brangwynne on the nucleolus! Congratulations Aidan!
Garrett gave an invited talk on his work deriving new ways to predict IDR-mediated interaction biases at the Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology (BBSB) retreat at Pere Marquette.
Alex –alongside friend-of-the-lab and children’s book star Thomas “Dr. Thomas” Boothby - organized (and attended/spoke at) the second bi-annual “Biological Plasticity” Telluride Workshop! A fantastic melding of topics - from psychedelics to animal body plan development to condensates to synthetic biology. Thanks so much to everyone who attended!
Jeff gave an invited talk at the Computational and Molecular Biology (CMB) program retreat on his work predicting IDR dimensions directly from sequence.
Emery presented a detailed and incredibly helpful overview and guide to applying for F-awards (as in, F30/F31/F32…) for the departmental Science Friday seminar. Thanks so much to Emery for putting this together and providing an invaluable resource to students and postdocs alike!
Aidan gave a fantastic Science Friday seminar detailing his work and experience at the Marine Biology Labs (MBL) Physiology Course this summer. Thanks so much for sharing your experience with the department!
Jackie gave an invited talk on her work exploring isoform-dependent circadian biology at the annual Water and Life Interface Institute (WALII) symposium!
Garrett gave a methods lunch talk on using SHEPHARD for integrative protein analysis.
Aidan becomes the Assistant Director of the Young Scientist Program (YSP) Continuing Mentors, and will be transitioning to director in December 2023!! Congratulations Aidan!
AUGUST
Jackie gave our departmental Science Friday seminar on her work exploring intrinsically disordered regions in the N. crassa circadian clock. Lots of exciting new results are emerging, and fantastic progress has been made in setting up a new model organism from scratch at a new institution (with zero other N. crassa scientists on campus!)! Also, Jackie is also definitely a sunflower biologist. No doubt about it.
We’re delighted to welcome Alex Keeley as a new Cori Fellow lab technician! Alex will be working directly with Jackie in her pursuit of all things circadian and disordered! Alex completed his bachelor’s in chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he completed undergraduate research in the Gruebele lab (incidentally, this is also where our science partner Shahar Sukenik completed his postdoctoral work - must be a good place!). Welcome Alex !!!
Dr. Jhullian ‘J’ Alston (!) starts his postdoc with TJ Ha at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Congrats J - we’re excited to see all the fantastic discoveries you make !!!
The SOURSOP paper was featured on the cover of the August edition of Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (JCTC)!
Alex was awarded this year’s Jayma Mikes Departmental Service award! The Jayma Mikes Service award is a Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics departmental award that recognizes a member of the department who has made a significant contribution to the well-being of the department through support, service, and promotion of diversity and inclusion.
Aidan returns to us after his summer in Woods Hole! Thanks to rotation leads Nicole King, Dyche Mullins, and Cliff Brangwynne, as well as course directors Dan Fletcher and Nicole King, for an absolutely spectacular summer!
JULY
Graduate student Jhullian ‘J’ Alston defends his thesis! J was co-advised with the Soranno lab, and his work has truly sat at the intersection of computational and experimental biophysics! He has single-handedly pulled the Holehouse lab into performing protein:RNA simulations with the Mpipi forcefield, among many results and publications has made some incredibly exciting discoveries on how IDRs can be conserved in spite of large changes in sequence variation. J will be moving on to complete postdoctoral work with D. T.J. Ha at Boston’s Children’s Hospital / Harvard medical school. As the first graduate student to “leave” the lab, this is a bitter-sweet affair, but we could not be prouder of all J has accomplished in his time in the lab. Congratulations, Dr. J!!
Alex travels to Woods Hole to spend some time with colleagues and friends on the cape. Thanks so much to Liam Holt for his unwavering hospitality. It was a pleasure to catch up with old friends and meet new ones!
Congrats to summer student Ethan Bartlett, who worked closely with Stephen and Ramiz to make amazing progress on our goal of understanding how IDRs function to sense their intracellular environment. In addition to working with yeast and performing a ton of molecular biology, Ethan, Stephen, and Ramiz did the first immunofluorescence the lab has done!
June
Jeff travels to NYC to spend time with the Chodera lab, Hanson lab, and (newly-tenured) Holt lab in New York. He gave talks at both the Flatiron Insitute and Memorial Sloane Kettering – Thanks to everyone, especially Sukrit Singh (MSKCC), Sonya Hanson (Flatiron), and Lance Denes (NYU) for your generous hospitality!
Alex, Aidan, and Garrett joined the Boothby and Sukenik labs for our first NSF-IntBio retreat! A wonderful few days discussing ongoing work, forging new directions, and team building on the beach. Thanks to the National Science Foundation for funding this grant and enabling our groups to work together on such exciting questions!
Aidan heads out to Woods Hole, MA, to attend the 2023 MBL Physiology Course! Aidan was also awarded a BMB professional development grant to help fund some of this course! Thanks so much BMB and congratulations to Aidan!
Jackie attends the Chronobiology GRC where she not only presents her work but wins one of the two poster prizes (along with former Hurley lab member and current Holehouse lab collaborator Meaghan Jankowski – Hurley lab crushing it!!).
Garrett and Ryan were awarded a BMB Seed Grant! This will fund new project ideas developed by Garrett and Ryan in the world of synthetic polymers – congratulations!
Ethan Bartlett joins the lab as a summer undergrad student through the departmental Summer Undergrad Research Group Experience (SURGE) program! Ethan will be working with Stephen and Ramiz on understanding how disordered regions influence pH sensing!
Jhullian is awarded a highly prestigious Burroughs Wellcome Fund Postdoctoral Enrichment Program (BWF-PDEP) fellowship! This fellowship provides funding and resources as Jhullian transitions into postdoctoral work with Dr. TJ Ha! Congratulations Jhullian!
May
After a long application season, Shubh has decided to join the outstanding and clearly best-in-world Washington University School of Medicine for medical school! Huge congrats to Shubh (and to WUSM, for recruiting such a fantastic class member!). This also marks Shubh’s graduation from Washington University, after which she will be working in the lab over the summer focussing on how mutations in IDRs influence their evolution and physiological function! So much to celebrate!
Emery was awarded a Keck Postdoctoral Fellowship! This one-year award will support his work in understanding how phosphorylation of disordered proteins influences their conformational and functional behavior! Thank you to the W.M. Keck Foundation, and huge congratulations Emery!
May Holehouse Lab happy hour was at The Royale.
Metapredict was featured in the CAID 2023 paper as one of the top 10 predictors (See Disorder-PBD)! Congrats Ryan and Dan! In addition to being among the most accurate, our new release of metapredict (V2.62, or metapredict V2-FF [fantastically fast]) offers a HUGE improvement on performance on both CPUs and GPUs. Proteome-wide predictions are now available in seconds to minutes! For more information see here.
Alex, Aidan, and Garrett attended the first Water and Life Interface Institute (WALII) retreat at the Carnegie Institute for Plant Biology in Paolo Alto. Alex gave a talk and Garrett and Aidan both presented posters. A wonderful three-day meeting of talks, brainstorming, and discussion, and it was wonderful to see the Boeynaems, Boothby, and Sukenik labs, among many others! Thanks so much to the advisory board for their thoughts and suggestions, Sue Rhee for organizing, and for Selena Rice and Elena Lazarus for running the show and keeping us all in check!
Garrett attended the Breakout Ventures event in Boston, where he got to enjoy hearing about the latest and greatest in biotech!
Jhullian ‘J’ Alston was hooded as part of his Ph.D. graduation! Jhullian was one of several BBSB graduate students in this year’s ceremony, including his partner-in-crime and science superstar Jasmine Cubuk (not pictured). Congrats Jhullian and Jasmine!!!
Jeff attended the MOLSSI-organized conference entitled “Machine learning and chemistry: Are We There Yet?” in Maryland. This workshop focussed on the emerging world of deep learning and computational chemistry. Jeff presented a poster on ALBATROSS and enjoyed insightful discussions with attendees and presenters alike. Thanks so much to Pratyush Tirway for organizing, MOLSSI for funding, and the speakers and attendees for a wonderful meeting.
APRIL
April happy hour was at Milo's Tavern where the lab played Bocce Ball!
Jhullian hosts the inaugural INSPIRE conference as chair of ABBGS! In this role, he invited Melanie McReynolds as a speaker and held a career panel on Academia. Congratulations Jhullian!
Garrett was awarded the 2022 Millipore Sigma Award! The Sigma Chemical Company established this fellowship in 1958 in the Department of Biological Chemistry (now Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics) to honor Dr. Gerty Cori. Dr. Cori and her husband, Dr. Carl Cori, both worked in the Department of Biological Chemistry, and won a Nobel Prize in 1947 for their discovery of how glycogen is broken down and re-synthesized within the body. This huge honor recognizes Garrett’s work inside and outside the lab! Congratulations Garrett!
Jhullian was featured in the DBBS 50th Anniversary celebration!
March
Jhullian’s pupper Huey is less than keen on the St. Louis spring showers…
Jeff proposed his thesis - congratulations Jeff!
Prof. Jen Hurley visited the lab for a short visit to learn about molecular simulations! It was a pleasure to run a short course on simulation ins and outs for Jen and discuss the application of simulations in understanding circadian biology.
After a one-year term as director of operations for the Biotechnology and Life Sciences Advisory Group (BALSA), Garrett's term has ended. Congratulations, Garrett, for all your work in driving BALSA to new heights!
Garrett started as a part-time Venture Capital Fellow at Breakout Ventures! In this role, he is covering early-stage creative biotech companies and learning more about the VC space!
The Holehouse lab moved into our newly renovated drylab space! Thanks so much to dept. Chair Ben Garcia for the unwavering support and for fully renovating our space as the lab has grown!
Shubh received the Harriet K. Switzer Leadership award from the WashU Women's Society! Congratulations Shubh!
February
Alex visited The Scripps Research Institute for a day of scientific discussion with Keren Lasker and Steven Boeynaems. It was a pleasure to meet with the Lasker lab, discuss PopZ, and strategize for future scientific adventures!
Alex, Borna, Emery, Jeff, and J attended the 2023 Biophysical Society Meeting in San Diego. Borna, Emery, Jeff, and J presented posters, with J winning a Biophysical Society Student Research Achievement Award (SRAA) for his poster on protein:RNA interactions. Congratulations J!
Aidan is accepted into the 2023 Marine Biology Labs (MBL) physiology course as part of the 2023 cohort! Congratulations Aidan!!!
JANUARY
Garrett, Ryan, and J attended the 2023 Keystone “Biomolecular Condensates: Emerging Cellular and Biophysical Roles” in Vancouver, Canada. All three presented posters on their emerging work and had a fantastic time!
Aidan and Emery gave fantastic talks in the departmental Science Friday seminar series for the BBSB graduate student recruits! Aidan spoke about his work on synthetic condensate design, while Emery spoke about the development and application of phospho-parameters.
Madison Stringer joins the Holehouse lab for a rotation! Madison is a first-year BBSB graduate student who will be working on developing the PopTag work Dan has been developing. Welcome Madison!
2022
December
The Holehouse and Robertson labs held a successful first (annual!?) white elephant holiday party!
Alex gave an invited talk at the second PhasAGE conference in Brussels, Belgium. This meeting focused on biochemical determinants of condensate formation and gave Alex a chance to speak about the lab’s ongoing work on the molecular grammar of molecular interactions in condensates. Thanks so much to Peter Tompa, Ludo Van Den Bosch, Sandra Ribeiro, and Rita Vilaça for a fantastic meeting and all the help from Peter and Ludo’s lab (especially Mark Lackey!).
Jackie’s pupper Goose is adjusting nicely to life in MO; only a flannel is necessary for the December weather.
Long-time friend of the lab Dr. Wade Zeno, visited the Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics to give a seminar on his work studying IDRs in the context of membrane curving and sensing. It was a pleasure to have Wade visit, learn about his work, and show him some St. Louis BBQ!
NOVEMBER
The lab kicked off its monthly happy hour event organized by Cori Fellow Jackie! This month’s outing was to Urban Chestnut!
Alex gave an invited talk at the “Specificity Determinants of Biomolecular Interactions” symposium honoring the late Aharon Katzir at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Thanks so much to Gideon Schreiber and all the organizers for an absolutely spectacular meeting!
OCTOBER
Emery and Jhullian presented their work at the 2022 Gibbs Conference on Thermodynamics in Carbondale, Illinois.
Alex was the “opponent” in the Ph.D. thesis examination for Eric Fagerberg - a graduate student with Prof. Marie Skepö at Lund University in Sweden. Eric did a fantastic job and passed with flying colors! Congratulations Dr. Fagerberg, and thank you Marie for the invitation to participate in my first Swedish thesis defense!
September
Alex gave an invited talk at the National Cancer Insitute’s Understanding the Role of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs) in Cancer Biology Workshop. The workshop was a huge success, and the role and importance of disordered proteins in cancer have never been more clear!
Alex gave an invited talk at the University of Nebraska and had a fantastic visit meeting students and faculty and learning about a lot of extremely cool redox chemistry! Thanks so much to Alex Vecchio for the kind invitation, wonderful discussions, and unseasonably hot weather!
We are THRILLED to welcome Dr. Jackie Pelham to the lab as one of this year’s inaugural Cori Research Fellows! Jackie will be working on the role of intrinsically disordered regions in circadian biology and setting up Neurospora crassa as a model system. Welcome Jackie!
Alex gave an invited talk at the University of Southern Mississippi and had a wonderful couple of days meeting faculty and students and drinking the local IPAs. Thanks so much to Vijay Rangachari for the kind invitation and the warm hospitality, and to all the students for the fantastic questions and engagement during the seminar.
Alex gave an invited talk at Cornell (pronounced "Cornell", and the highest rank in the lvy League), where he had a wonderful time meeting with faculty and students - thanks so much to Brooks Crickard for the kind invitation, good food, and great company! It was all gorges!
Ramiz Somjee will join the lab as a graduate student co-advised with the Corbo lab! Ramiz is an MD/Ph.D. student in the Computational and Systems Biology (CSB) program and did undergraduate research with friend-of-the-lab Richard Kriwacki’s group at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Ramiz will be leading a new and exciting project at the intersection of cell fate, nuclear condensates, and molecular biophysics!
August
The lab has been awarded part of a five-year NSF center grant to study how organisms and ecosystems respond to variable water availability. The Water and Life Interface Institute (WALII) involves labs from the Carnegie Institution for Science, California State University Channel Islands, University of California Merced, the USDA Agricultural Research Service National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan State University, the University of Wyoming, and the Baylor College of Medicine. For more information, check out our center website!
July
Ryan has won this year’s Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation! As the postdoctoral winner, Ryan received a hefty prize fund and had the opportunity to attend the award ceremony at the Regeneron offices in Tarrytown, New York. Congratulations Ryan!
Alex heads to the Marine Biology Labs at Woods Hole for a week of science as Whitman Affiliate. Thanks so much to friend-of-the-lab Liam Holt for the invitation!
Ryan’s perspective on a recent paper describing an intrinsically disordered CO2 sensor was published in Nature Cell Biology!
Ryan and Dan’s update to metapredict (metapredict V2) is on bioRxiv, GitHub and PyPI. This update provides a major improvement in Metapredict's accuracy by making use of data from AlphaFold2. Importantly, metapredict still correctly predicts disordered regions in proteins that AlphaFold2 gets wrong and encouragingly can predict IDRs and folded regions for completely synthetic proteins.
Jhullian has been awarded the incredibly prestigious 2023 Biomedical Engineering Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University! This is a semi-independent research position that provides funding and lab space for Jhullian to drive his research in collaboration with co-mentors TJ Ha and Danfeng Cai. Jhullian will start this position in the summer of 2023! Congratulations Jhullian!
Jhullian (executive board member and co-chair of WUSM’s Association of Black Biomedical Graduate Students) coordinated and ran a full day of STEM activities for 500 teenage African American boys involving surgery/suturing demos, making model lungs, DNA extraction from strawberries, and polymer chemistry (making bouncy balls from liquids!). Thanks so much to all the other volunteers who showed up to make this a great event!!
June
An exciting month as the lab welcomes four and a half new lab members!
Emery Usher joins us as a postdoc! Emery comes from Scott Showalter’s lab, where he combined a range of in vitro biophysical techniques to ask how IDRs function in the context of transcription (with an absolutely stunning and award-winning postdoc paper). In the Holehouse lab, he will be working on both computational and experimental projects in the context of PTMs, IDR conformational behavior, and understanding sequence-dependent regulatory features in IDR interactions.
Aidan Flynn joins us as a graduate student! Aidan is in the Plant and Microbial Biosciences (PMB) program and is driving the lab’s work on the directed evolution of IDRs!
Stephen Plassmeyer also joins us as a graduate student! Stephen is in the Biophysics, Biochemistry, and Structural Biology (BBSB) program and will be working on genotype/phenotype relationships driven by IDRs using yeast as a model system. Stephen will be developing novel computational and experimental methods to understand how IDRs drive specific biological processes in vivo.
Borna Novak also joins us as a graduate student! Borna is an MD/Ph.D. student in the Computational and Systems Biology (CSB) program and did the first part of his Ph.D. with Greg Bowman. Borna will be combing MD and MC simulations (in continued collaboration with the Bowman group) to develop new methods for investigating interactions between disordered regions and folded domains.
Finally, Jeff Lotthammer has fully switched into the lab from the Bowman group! Jeff is also a graduate student in the Computational and Systems Biology (CMB) program and will be working on a combination of deep learning approaches for understanding IDR ensembles coupled with new methods to quantify sampling and heterogeneity.
The lab hosted a fantastic outreach event teaching middle-school kids how to code! Using the Scratch programming language, the students built a simple video game, learning the basics of control flow, logical statements, and variables. This event was sponsored by the NSF through our collaborative IntBio grant with the Sukenik and Boothby labs, and sets the foundation for future events going forward!
Alex, Ryan, Jhullian, Garrett, and Dan all went to Switzerland for the 2022 Intrinsically Disordered Proteins Gordon Research Conference. A fantastic opportunity to talk science, catch up with friends, and enjoy the Swiss alps! Ryan, Jhullian, Garrett, and Dan all presented posters, while Alex simply enjoyed the science and the gorgeous scenery!
We are incredibly excited to announce that Jackie Pelham (currently in the Hurley lab at RPI) will be coming to the Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics as an independent Cori Fellow! Cori Fellows are independent research positions that work alongside department labs to pursue their own research questions and are provided with their own space as well as funds for salary, research support, and travel. Jackie will be working in collaboration with the lab to understand the role of disorder in the context of circadian biology, further bolstering the departments’ strengths in the area of IDRs! Congratulations Jackie!!!
With Alex as the director of the Department’s undergraduate research program, we are delighted to welcome six fantastic scientists who will be working in different labs across the Department! Special thanks to the many trainees who have helped shape the summer program (notably Aidan, Jeff, Ryan, and Garrett from the Holehouse lab, and many others from other labs as well!!).
May
Alex gave an invited talk on the lab’s work on stickers-and-spacers at the 2022 EMBO liquid-liquid phase separation meeting in Heidelberg. Thanks so much to the organizers for the wonderful opportunity to catch up with old friends and meet some new ones!
Collaborative work led by the Soranno and Galletto labs and in collaboration with the Galburt labs has finally been published in JMB!
Garrett’s perspective on the recent TDP-43 phosphorylation paper was published in EMBO!
Graduate students Jhullian and Dan presented at the BMB Departmental retreat! Dan presented a poster on his emerging work looking at IDR specificity in yeast, while Jhullain gave a talk on his work on SARS-CoV-2 genome compaction driven by the nucleocapsid protein.
April
In collaboration with the Soranno and Hall labs, the lab has been awarded a five-year R01 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIH-NIAID) to work on the molecular biophysics of SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid protein:RNA interaction! Thanks to everyone for your hard work on this exciting project!
March
Graduate student Jeff Lotthammer was awarded an NSF-GRFP! Congratulations Jeff!
The lab has been awarded a three-year Human Frontier Science Program grant to study and understand IDR evolution. This grant – in close collaboration with Kate Lee (U Toronto) and Dolf Weijers (Wageningen University) – will enable the lab to study how disordered proteins evolve in the context of a large family of plant transcription factors.
Alex spoke as an invited speaker at the 2022 CECAM Intrinsically Disordered Proteins meeting in beautiful Zurich. This meeting (“From disordered biomolecular complexes to biological coacervates”) focussed on the physics and physical chemistry underlying IDR behavior and self-assembly. A truly fantastic meeting and an opportunity to catch up with old colleagues and meet new friends. Thanks to Robert Best, Birthe Kragelund, Kresten Lindorff-Larsen, and Ben Schuler for the kind invitation.
Garrett was elected as the Director of Operations for BALSA! BALSA (Biotechnology and Life Science Advising Group) is a science and technology consulting non-profit based at Washington University that follows trainee-driven leadership and provides direct real-world consultancy opportunities to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Congratulations Garrett!!
February
Congratulations to Ryan who wins this year’s John E. Majors Award! The Majors award was created in 2018 to recognize the outstanding accomplishments in research and teaching accomplishments. Incredibly well-deserved!
Alex was honored to speak as one of the Futures of Biophysics speakers at the 2022 Biophysical Society meeting in San Francisco. A wonderful session in which 2/4 speakers spoke about IDPs! Thanks for snapping this picture Jeff!
January
2022 marks the start of year 2 in the Holehouse lab! Lots of exciting things to come, and such a fantastic team of people to work with! We are excited to welcome two new members to the lab!
Aidan Flynn joins us as a rotation student! Aidan previously worked in the Haswell lab where he picked up an interest in IDPs, and will be working on our burgeoning projects in directed evolution.
We’re also pleased to “welcome” Dr. Ryan Emenecker as the first postdoc to join the Holehouse lab. Ryan will be pushing on developing new experimental approaches for studying IDRs, as well as tools for the rational design of disordered proteins. Welcome (back) Ryan!
2021
December
Graduate student Ryan defends his thesis! Ryan completed much of his Ph.D. in the Strader lab working on auxin signaling, but when the Strader lab moved to Duke he finished his final year in the lab, exploring how IDRs in auxin-responsive transcription factors undergo self-assembly. Thankfully for us, Ryan will remain in the lab as a postdoc where he is driving the lab’s wetlab efforts and will be working on questions in synthetic biology and molecular evolution. Congratulations Dr. Emenecker!!
November
Dan and Garrett both proposed their theses with flying colors! So excited to see the cool science emerging from their work!!
October
Alex had a wonderful time giving an in-person (!) talk at Berkeley. A pleasure to see old friends and meet new ones. Thanks so much to Darren Kahan and all the students and faculty.
The lab’s work on using the stickers-and-spacers framework to understand condensate assembly in the contact of the Balbiani body is out in Biochemistry - congrats to co-authors Dan and Garrett! A wonderful collaboration with the Böke lab at the Center for Cell and Developmental Biology in Barcelona!
September
We welcome rotation student Stephen Plassymeyer to the lab! Stephen previously worked in the Dougherty lab, and will be working on understanding how IDRs influence transcription in yeast.
The lab’s Longer Life Foundation grant was renewed for a second year! Thanks so much for the continued support of our work!
August
Ryan’s paper is accepted in Biophysical Journal - coming online soon! Congratulations Ryan (and co-author Dan)!
Ishan’s paper is accepted in Current Research in Structural Biology - also coming online soon! Congratulations Ishan!
Dan’s paper is accepted at eLife! Congrats Dan!
Graduate student JJ has received his NOA for the prestigious F99/K00 award! This is a five-year NIH award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to fund the end of his graduate work and the first three years of his postdoctoral research. JJ was WashU’'s candidate for this award, and nationally only 24 awards are made each year! Congratulations JJ!!!
We welcome Ramiz Somjee as an MSTP rotation student! Ramiz joins us from Richard Kriwacki’s lab, will be working on understanding the pH sensing in a disordered yeast protein, as well as some computational contributions towards the upcoming SPARROW analysis package.
July
The lab has received a 4-year $992,485 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the molecular basis of desiccation tolerance via the NSF’s new Integrative Biology (IntBio) mechanism! This work will be done in collaboration with the Boothby lab at the University of Wyoming and the Sukenik lab at UC Merced.
Alex spoke at the 2021 IDP Telluride meeting on the lab’s work understanding disorder and function in the yeast chromatin-binding protein Abf1. Thanks so much to Lia and Scott for the invitation.
Rock-star research bioinformatician/all-around scientist extraordinaire Ishan Taneja leaves the lab to pursue graduate school at Scripps! Ishan joined the lab right around when the pandemic hit and worked remotely for the first year before spending a couple of months in St. Louis. In his short time, Ishan made remarkable progress, including contributions towards multiple papers as well as his own first-author paper currently under review. Scripps’ gain is our loss - we will miss Ishan tremendously and are excited to see the work he does over the coming years.
Clinical resident Mark Valentine (MD/Ph.D) spent time in the lab working on the intersection between clinical mutations in ovarian cancer and disorder!
Rotation student Jeff Lotthammer will join the Bowman lab with a co-advised position in the Holehouse lab! Welcome, Jeff!
The fantastic FLOE1 paper (with very minor contributions from Alex) is out in Cell! Congrats to all the authors - a true tour-de-force of collaborative work spanning length scales, disciplines, and even continents!
June
Shub’s perspective on the recent cGAS phase separation paper is out in Molecular Cell! Congrats Shub!!
April
We welcome Nathan Zelt to the lab as a rotation student! Nathan is a first-year graduate student in the BBSB program and will be working in the wetlab to explore how IDRs impact growth and function in yeast!
JJ’s review/perspective (written very closely with co-advisor Andrea Soranno) on integrating single-molecule spectroscopy and simulations is out in Methods! Congratulations JJ!
March
The lab’s recent paper with the Soranno lab on SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid assembly published in Nature Communications where it is featured as an Editor’s Highlight! Congrats to JJ and Dan, and to first author Jasmine Cubuk, and the rest of the Soranno lab, Bowman lab, Hall lab and Jason Wagoner !
Graduate student Dan was awarded an NSF-GRFP for his graduate work on exploring specificity in disordered proteins! Congratulations Dan!
Undergraduate Esther Faronbi was awarded a competitive NSF REU fellowship to work at Penn State in the dept. of chemical engineering over the summer! Congratulations Esther!
Undergraduate Shubhanjali Minhas was awarded a BioSURF fellowship to work in the lab over the summer! Congratulations Shub!
February
Alex gave a (virtual) talk on the lab’s new work on IDR evolution at the Carnegie Institute of Plant Biology at Stanford University. Thanks so much to Heather Meyer and Moi Exposito-Alonso for the invitation, and to all the people Alex met with during his ‘visit’!
Graduate student Dan passed his qualifying exam in the CMB program! Congratulations Dan!
January
JJ gave his MilliporeSigma Fellowship talk with Soranno lab grad student Jasmine Cubuk! Congrats JJ and Jasmine!
2020
December
Alex gave a virtual talk for the IDPSIG/IDPSeminars holiday bash on the lab’s work on SARS CoV-2 genome compaction.
Graduate student Garrett passed his qualifying exam in the BBSB program! Congratulations Garrett!
Alex gave a (virtual) talk at NYU in the Genes, Systems, and Computation Seminar Series on the lab’s collaborative work with the fantastic Korber lab! Thanks to Liam Holt for the kind invitation!
November
A wonderful gift from the lab to Alex to commemorate the (nearly) 1-year anniversary of the lab starting! Includes Alex’ original graduate student photo at WashU for a nice ‘how it started/how it’s going’ effect.
We welcome Jeff Lotthammer to the lab as a rotation student! Jeff is a first year graduate student in the BBSB program and will be working on all-atom simulations of a disordered protein to understand how mutations and post-translational modifications impact conformational behaviour!
The lab’s most recent paper on sensing changes in solution space is accepted and published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters! Congrats to Feng, David and Garrett for all their hard work on this - another wonderful collaboration with the Sukenik group!
October
We’re thrilled to announce that the lab’s work is now being funded by the Longer Life Foundation! This grant will focus on the development of methods for uncovering disease-associated changes in disordered protein-regions.
The review by Alex and friend-of-the-lab Erik Martin on the molecular basis for phase separation (or lack thereof) as driven by disordered regions is out in Emerging Topics in Life Sciences.
Congratulations to Ryan - his review on phase separation in plant biology was published in Developmental Cell!
September
JJ is one of the two 2020 MilliporeSigma Fellows (along with co-superstar Jasmine Cubuk from the Soranno lab!). The MilliporeSigma fellowship was created in 1958 (!!!) as a gift to the Department of Biological Chemistry (now Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics) in memory of Dr. Gerty Cori. Dr. Cori and her husband, Dr. Carl Cori, performed research in the Department of Biological Chemistry. They won a Nobel Prize in 1947 for their discoveries of how glycogen is broken down and re-synthesized within the body. Congratulations JJ !!!
Graduate student Isaac Plutzer joins the lab for a fall rotation! Isaac is a first-year graduate student in the computational and molecular biology graduate program and is working on the intersection of proximity-based labeling and IDRs!
August
The lab’s latest paper is live on biorxiv! An ongoing collaboration with the Sukenik lab, we combined simulations, theory and a new high-throughput experimental approach developed in Shahar’s lab to assess how different IDRs respond to different solution conditions. This was a close collaboration between Garrett and Alex with Shahar, David and Feng! Tweetorial on the paper can be found here from Shahar and here from Alex.
July
Ryan held two intro Python workshops for the Center for Engineering MechanoBiology (CEMB). The first was focused on introducing basic Python functionality and was given to CEMB undergraduates. The second was focused on using Python for analysis and visualization of large data sets and was given to graduate students for the 2020 CEMB Bootcamp.
Esther gave a fantastic presentation at the final uSTAR summer symposium on her work in the lab! Thanks so much to everyone, and of course a big thank you to Jim Skeath for all his hard work in running this program!
June
Cydne Ratliff joins the lab for research over the summer (and hopefully thereafter, if we can ever open the wetlab)! Cydne is working with Ryan to explore how isoform specific disorder may influence biological function.
The labs first preprint with the Soranno lab on SARS-CoV-2 is now available on bioRxiv!
Esther Faronbi joins the lab for research over the summer ! Esther is working on a new project to understand mysterious “microproteins” through sequence analysis, and will be working with Dan on this project.
May
Exciting few weeks for the lab! Both Garrett and Dan have chosen to join the lab to complete their graduate work, and we welcome Ishan Taneja who joins the lab as a bioinformatics research assistant!
April
Shub Minhas joins the lab for research during the spring semester and over the summer! Shub is working on understanding and predicting cryptic disorder, and will be completing her research remotely as we shelter in place!
March
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have relocated from our usual working location of “in the lab” to “home”, where we’ll stay for the foreseeable future. Uncertain times are ahead, but the safety of all lab members is the number 1 priority.
The lab’s second paper is published in PLoS One! The collaboration between Alex and Sarah Staniland dates to the early 90s when a young Sarah made a 6-year-old Alex a friendship bracelet. Who could have guessed the implications of that exchange! In this project, we explored how a short IDR in a ferric binding protein contributes to the assembly of magnetosomes - mono-disperse magnetic crystals that allow magnetotactic bacteria to align with the earth’s magnetic field for unknown reasons.
February
Alex and Garrett headed to the Biophysical Society Meeting in San Diego! Garrett presented a poster on his new methods for analyzing IDR sequences. A fantastic meeting as always, and wonderful to see so many colleagues back at the ranch.
One of the main papers from Alex’ postdoctoral work was published in Science! This work represents an unbelievable amount of effort from many different people and spans collaborative work across the Pappu, Mittag, and Soranno labs.
Dan Griffith joins the lab for a rotation! Dan is a first-year graduate student in the Computational and Systems Biology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Dan will be working on a new approach for assessing transient helicity within intrinsically disordered proteins!
January
The lab’s first paper is published in JCTC ! In a long-standing collaboration with the Sukenik lab at UC Merced, we explored how the solution environment can be used to tune residual structure in IDRs. Check out the Twitter thread from Shahar summarizing the paper.
JJ has successfully proposed his thesis! His project involves integrating single-molecule spectroscopy with simulations across multiple resolutions to understand the physical determinants of protein-nucleic acid phase separation! Congratulations JJ!
Garrett Ginell joins the lab for his final rotation! Garrett is a first-year graduate student in the Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology graduate program at Washington University in St. Louis. Garrett will be extending his work on high-throughput integrated informatics analysis of disordered proteins. Welcome Garrett!
Ryan Emenecker joins us as the lab’s second graduate student! Ryan is a graduate student in the Plant and Microbial Biology Program at Washington University School of Medicine and is a joint student between the Holehouse and Strader labs. Ryan will finish up experimental work in the Strader lab as the lab prepares to move to Duke and will move over full-time towards the summer of 2020. Welcome Ryan!
Happy New Year! January 1st, 2020 marks the official opening of the Holehouse lab!
2019
November
Alex had a wonderful visit to the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Wyoming. Thanks so much to Thomas Boothby for the invitation - a fantastic day meeting with faculty and students, followed by a wild day exploring the wilderness in Wyoming!
September
In collaboration with the Sukenik lab at UC Merced, the Holehouse lab has been award a large allocation on the NSF-sponsored XSEDE supercomputing facility! These resources will support our efforts to understand how the solution environment influences the conformational behavior of disordered proteins.
August
Jhullian “JJ” Alston joins the Holehouse lab as its first graduate student! JJ is a graduate student in the Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology graduate program at Washington University in St. Louis and is joint student between the Holehouse and Soranno labs. Welcome JJ !!!
Garrett Ginell’s book chapter on analyzing the amino acid sequences of disordered proteins has been accepted for publication in Intrinsically Disordered Proteins: Methods and Protocols (Methods in Molecular Biology). Congratulations Garrett !!!
July
Alex attended the “Intrinsically Disordered Proteins; Using Diverse Methods to Understand Biological Roles” Telluride Science Research Center meeting. A pleasure to catch up with collaborators and friends. Thanks to Richard Kriwacki, Chris Stanely, and Arvind Ramanathan for the invitation.
May
Alex attended the “Liquid Phase Condensation as a Cellular Regulatory Mechanism: A State of the Science and Implications for Cancer Research” meeting at the National Cancer Institute, a small workshop to discuss the interplay between phase separation and cancer. The meeting was a huge success - thanks to Richard Kriwacki and Geeta Narlikar for their kind invitation to join.
April
Alex attended the 2019 Physical Basis of Cellular Adaptation and Memory workshop at the Bellairs Research Institute in Barbados. A truly stimulating meeting at the bleeding edge of quantitative cell biology! Thanks to Jackie Vogel and Simon Alberti for the invitation!
March
The Holehouse Lab website goes live! The lab will officially open in January 2020, but Alex is available to meet with prospective rotation students or postdocs to discuss projects at any point during 2019. Those interested should contact Alex directly.