R.I.P. pfam database

It’s the end of the line for one of my favourite bioinformatics resources, the pfam database. I found this out the hard way, as I was preparing to give my usual lecture on transcription factors and DNA binding domains in my course this semester. As part of the motivation for …

farewell to Michelle

Michelle’s time in the lab is over, so we celebrated the end of the semester. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited to see these cupcakes! Even more surprising is that the logo on top turned out to be edible! Congratulations Michelle and thanks for the cupcakes.

farewell to Alex

Last week we celebrated Alex’s time in the lab with a little farewell lunch. It’s an understatement to say that he will have a lasting impact on what we do. Hard to believe that when Alex started, no one in the lab had used a GPU! Beyond his work, Alex …

Is SARS-cov-2 evolution inevitable?

On Friday I had a very interesting chat with Jesse Bloom about his work that showed the mutations the coronavirus can acquire to evade antibodies and, perhaps, ultimately the immune response. Jessie showed that the virus can escape individual antibodies, probably natural immunity and even vaccine-induced immunity (in the worst …

lab “pizza” lunch

Here’s most of us having our a “pizza” lunch. We are saying farewell to Amy (again) and celebrating Gang and Dina’s projects. Obviously, this semester has been different. Still, I hope we’ve learned. It helped me to put our semester in perspective: Cambridge sent home its students in the 1660s, …