Biochemical Analysis Leads to Improved Orthogonal Bioluminescent Tools (Prescher, Leconte) UCI Chemistry UCI Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences #openaccess onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cb…

The Leconte Lab is on the move to this week's ASBMB in Seattle! Check out Ysabel David, Hailey Kang, and Celia Fritsch presenting on poylmerase project, Clair Colee and Reema Iqbal presenting on the luciferase project, and Abe Vasquez presenting on his summer work at UCSF!

Congrats to lab alums Madison Seto (UCSF, Wells Group, awarded NSF GRFP!) and Whitney Lieberman (Harvard, Kadoch Group, Honorable Mention for NSF GRFP!). We are proud of you and excited to see all you discover in grad school and beyond!

So grateful for this support from Research Corporation for Science Advancement ! We are super excited to have Marcell Simon (PIT '23) for a postbac experience in the coming year!

Congratulations to lab alum Ellery Koelker-Wolfe (CMC '19) who was awarded a prestigious NCAA Postgraduate Fellowship! This award supports her ongoing MD at Harvard and recognizes her excellence on the basketball court, the classroom, and the research laboratory! Claremont McKenna College

New paper from lab alum Whitney Lieberman! A really elegant approach to sensing Ac-CoA in complex samples (plus it is always fun to see alums using luciferase after leaving our lab). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37486078/

The latest chapter in Marya Ornelas' (PIT '20) work in the Angad Mehta lab! This work further explores platforms that can be used to develop drugs and vaccines against emerging viruses. This is the third Leconte Lab alum first author paper this week!! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37498174/

Such a treat and an honor to be invited by former students (Susanna Barrett and Marya Ornelas) to give a seminar at UIUC! I even got to see the exact corn plot where the Illinois Long Term Selection Experiment is ongoing (been evolving corn since 1896 on this plot of land!).

Congrats to lab alum @cayditty (SCR '19) on publishing this review article! The article discusses creating and applying aqueous droplets that can stably exist in water. It was really interesting to learn about this new-to-me field! Nice work, Caitlyn!

Congrats, David! My first undergraduate mentee is out there winning awards. This is really cool to see you still doing really exciting science after all these years!

Check out our latest pre-print! doi.org/10.26434/chemr…. In this paper, we describe new high-throughput biochemical techniques to study firefly luciferase, and we use this approach to make some interesting discoveries about the mechanism of color determination.

Excited to share a preprint for this project: Madison Seto, Taia Wu and I wrote a guide to provide simple, usable, PRACTICAL advice for more inclusive, equitable, and effective hiring of researchers in labs. Comments and sharing are VERY encouraged! chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxi…

My department is looking for a visiting faculty member who will teach Biochemistry with us next year! This is a great opportunity for someone interested in a PUI to get some experience (I'll teach you everything that I know). Please share far and wide! scrippscollege.edu/hr/faculty/vis…

New paper from our group! Here, we use a high-throughput approach to identify 70 novel red-shifting mutations of luciferase. Congrats especially to the nine undergraduate student co-authors on the project! pubs.acs.org/doi/epdf/10.10…

Congrats to Whitney Lieberman who received an F31 fellowship from the NIH! The award supports her ongoing PhD work with Cigall Kadoch at Harvard. Congrats, Whitney; the recognition is well-deserved!!

Excited to see Taia Wu's work in Gestwicki Lab in print! A truly beautiful story that has been fun to watch develop. Not only did Taia publish the big fancy paper (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38744946/), but she published companion works on the method and software so it is useful to others!

Clair Colee (recently graduated student) and I wrote a short primer on Directed Evolution! It is a 4-6 hour read to introduce young grad students/senior undergrads to the fundamentals of the field. Please read and share and get the word out! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

Super excited and grateful for this support from RCSA! This is a project dreamt up during the pandemic with Madison Seto (SCR '21) and started in the lab by Ysabel David (SCR '25). Very excited to have this support to fully explore this new fun direction for us!