For the collection celebrating the 65th anniversary of the Journal of Cell biology, our paper Functional Analysis of Kinetochore Assembly in Caenorhabditis elegans was selected for its contribution to “dissecting the mechanics of cell division”. The paper from 2001 by Karen and Arshad, postdocs in our lab at the time has great company there. Click here for the link

We, past and current members of the Hyman lab, are reeling from the sudden and tragic loss of Suzanne Eaton. She was a wonderful person who lives on in our hearts. In this difficult time, we stand together with her family and colleagues.

https://www.mpi-cbg.de/suzanne-eaton/

One of great things here at the MPI-CBG are our Service and Facilities, among them the protein expression facility (PEPC), which has been heavily used by us in recent years. In collaboration with Jeff Woodruff, a former postdoc, they developed FlexiBAC, an amazingly versatile protein expression system in insect cells, which was developed with a huge range of different constructs and tags, which might fit your needs as well.

Have a look at the original publication here .Plasmids are available at Addgene.

From 4th to 13th February we taught our first EMBO course

Methods for Studying Phase Separation in Biology here in Dresden at the MPI-CBG and CSBD.

The course was organized together with the Tang and Alberti lab, including morning lectures, theoretical or experimental parts during the day and a relaxing evening part. Importantly, we included as well the project ideas of our participants. They came from 12 different nations in Europe, Asia and America and made the course truly international and fun!

We are still amazed by the great feed back we got, it was a big success for all of us, and most importantly for our participants!

Check out @Hymanlab and #EMBOPhaseSeparation on Twitter for more

Now, the paper got published in Science! Congratulations to Adam and all the coauthors. And check out the perspective article about the paper from the Brangwynne lab (@Brangwynnelab), as well as the press article from the CSBD and from the CBG .

We are excited to share our pre-print which explores how phase separation affects noise in cells. The question of how cells manage to tightly control protein concentrations has been a long-standing challenge in biology. In collaboration with the Zechner and Jülicher groups, we now show in theory and experiments that liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) can be a very effective mechanism to buffer protein concentrations against gene expression noise.

The protein condensates used in our study dissolve during mitosis so that the protein concentration in the dilute, bulk phase is no longer buffered and variability becomes apparent.

In conclusion our results suggest a novel role of phase separation for gene regulation and biological information processing.

See below a mitosis movie of the tagged DDX4 protein construct

Click for the pdf of the preprint or go to the biorxiv page

An increasing number of proteins with intrinsically disordered domains have been shown to phase separate in buffer to form liquidlike phases. These protein condensates serve as simple models for the investigation of the more complex membraneless organelles in cells. To understand the function of such proteins in cells, the material properties of the condensates they form are important.

Fig: scheme of the set up based on a dual optical trap

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Louise and her coworkers now developed a novel method based on optical traps to study the frequency-dependent rheology and the surface tension of P-granule protein PGL-3 condensates as a function of salt concentration. Have a look at the pdf or follow the link below.

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