The Dunham Lab recent paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry has been named an Editor’s Pick. The paper, “Importance of a tRNA anticodon loop modification and a conserved, noncanonical anticodon stem pairing in tRNACGGPro for decoding” is also the first paper for graduate research Ha An Nguyen who is featured in an author profile. In the profile, Ha An shares one of the most exciting parts of the research process:
“It was when we saw diffraction spots at high resolution for the first time! I spent a year setting up about one hundred crystallization trials and subsequently screening hundreds of beautiful crystals with not much success. It was very emotionally taxing to be sleep-deprived (most of our synchrotron times were during the night) and have your precious crystals diffract poorly. While I understood spending a year attempting to perform X-ray crystallography is not much time, as a starting graduate student, I couldn’t help but feel that I was a failed crystallographer. That one crystal ended up being all I needed, and the structure, along with the biochemistry, seemed to fall into place. We collected the X-ray data in October 2018 and wrote the paper in 3 months.”
Congratulations to Ha An and the Dunham Lab!
Further Reading
- http://www.jbc.org/content/294/14/5281 (journal link)
- http://www.jbc.org/content/294/14/5281.full.pdf?with-ds=yes (PDF)
- http://www.jbc.org/content/294/14/5281/suppl/DCAuthor_profile