Author Archives: jblucks

The 4th International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering just wrapped up. The entire conference (co-organized by Kristala Prather (MIT) and Ali Khademhosseini (Harvard)) was a fantastic combination of work on synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, protein engineering and the latest biomolecular engineering tools. Julius presented Melissa’s latest work on engineering larger families of orthogonal RNA transcriptional regulatorsContinue reading “Julius gave a talk at the 4th International Conference on Biomolecular Engineering”

Current Protocols in Chemical Biology has just published our SHAPE-Seq protocol paper “SHAPE-Seq: High-Throughput RNA Structure Analysis”. The full text can be found here. This is the best place to start to get a sense of the background behind the technique, and a very detailed step-by-step protocol of all aspects of the protocol including data analysisContinue reading “The SHAPE-Seq protocol paper is online!”

That’s right, SHAPE-Seq has its first official mention on the free online encyclopedia under the Nucleic Acid Structure Determination page. You can see the mention right after theSHAPE section. Here’s to more people using and improving SHAPE-Seq!

Jeff Tabor, a rising star in synthetic biology now at Rice  wrote an excellent news and views article about our recent Nature Methods paper on engineering RNA transcriptional regulators. This is a particularly exciting paper led by Chang Liu in the Arkin Lab (soon to be at UC Irvine) where we were able to convert RNA-based translationContinue reading “Recent RNA transcriptional converter article featured in Nature Methods News and Views”

Julius, Dr. Jeremy Thompson and Professor Keith Perry of Cornell Plant Sciences were recently awarded a Gates Grand Challenge Exploration Grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (http://www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Pages/GrantsAwarded.aspx?Round=9&Phase=1). These grants are an extension of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s commitment to the Grand Challenges in Global Health, which was launched in 2003 toContinue reading “Julius wins Gates Grand Challenge Exploration Grant with Jeremy Thompson and Keith Perry!”

The Lucks Lab descended from the Castle of Greyskull to claim this years CBE best halloween costume shield. It wasn’t that hard in the end as we simply unveiled our true nature as Masters of the Universe. Happy Halloween!

Yueting Zhang has officially started in the lab as our first post-doc ever! Welcome Yueting!

Julius was invited to present at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center’s 14th annual Fall symposium on “Explorations in Synthetic and Systems Biology”. The Danforth center in St. Louis was started in 2001 and is one of the country’s four largest non-profit plant research centers (along with Cornell’s own Boyce-Thompson Institute). The symposium was fantastic withContinue reading “Julius Presents at Danforth Center Symposium”

This was another great SynBERC retreat with a couple of milestones for the lab. Melissa gave a fantastic talk on her attenuator engineering work – the first talk to come out of the lab! David’s SHAPE-Seq poster had a line of visitors too! Here we are making an obligatory pilgrimage to the Broad Institute withContinue reading “Melissa and David Present at the SynBERC Fall Retreat”

Welcome to Tim Abbott, a sophomore ChemE who will work with Kyle on an interesting project about RNA-protein interactions. Welcome Tim!