When I was writing my tenure-track job applications back in 2013, I was thinking hard about research projects. I was reading lots of papers and drafting research strategies to jump into once I secured a job. One of those projects focused on a phospho-tyrosine binding protein that had recently been discovered to be upregulated in breast cancer. Due to my interest in breast cancer, phospho-binding proteins, and protein-protein interactions, I thought MEMO1 would be a good topic for my independent career.
So move forward to the establishment of the Pollock lab at University of Richmond in 2014. We (read: Maddie Newkirk) started expressing, purifying, and characterizing this interesting protein. The students even came up with this fun graphic of our project (name that movie!).
Anyway, a long story short: 4 years, a collaboration with Dr. Carol Parish, and lots of successes and failures later, we have published our first manuscript on MEMO1. Thank you to the 4 students who performed biochemical assays: Madeline Newkirk, Kristen Rubenstein, Jessica Kim, and Courtney Labrecque and to the 4 students who performed the computational studies: Justin Airas, Cooper Taylor, Hunter Evans, and Quincy McKoy. You deserve all the credit! Thank you to the reviewers at Biochemistry who helped strengthen our paper with all of their questions and clarifications… as stressful as it was to address them.
Interested in what we do? Take a look: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.biochem.8b00582
~jap
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