An excellent primer on indirect costs youtu.be/yxTDlFvkvio?si=1aoC…

What wonderful news to wake up to! Congratulations Gary!

This way, Quan attached various proteins onto AAV, including nanobody & full-length antibody, and created a retargeted AAV vector that selectively transduces HER2+ cancer cells with remarkable efficiency and selectivity (severely attenuated delivery to the liver)!

Quan’s strategy uses site-specific unnatural amino acid mutagenesis to introduce conjugation handles on capsid+ target protein, then link them together. It offers unparalleled control over site and stoichiometry (# of proteins/capsid) allowing optimization of conjugation function

Celebrating not one but TWO poster awards at the Bioorganic GRC by these two superstars from our group @cpsoni_74 and @ZHuang_Kuonji!

🚨🚨All genetic code expansion enthusiasts, don’t miss the GCE 2024 conference this summer (gceconferences.org/)! Fantastic speakers both from academia and industry. Please retweet! @klanglab @Mehl_lab

Engineered Cys is popular for site-specific ADCs, but gets disulfide capped during secretion. Reducing them also reduces structural disulfides, which requires reoxidation. Arianna’s approach avoids this convoluted workflow, enabling clean single-step introduction of thiols on Abs

However, how do you tell which aaRS mutants acylated the enriched tRNAs? @cpsoni_74 showed that you can insert a sequence barcode in the tRNA at a permissive site, and use it to encode each aaRS before selection, and decode successful ones after!

Using directed evolution, aaRSs have been engineered to charge 100s of noncanonical amino acids (ncAAs), where selection of active aaRSs rely on the ribosome to make a selectable reporter

They also demonstrated that, not surprisingly, eCLIC is compatible with both SPAAC and IEDDA. Combined with dual-ncAA mutagenesis to introduce 5HTP and an azide-ncAA, eCLIC+SPAAC can be cleanly and site-specifically double label a protein