PhD defence and Norways national day

On Friday last week Susana Gonçalves defended her PhD thesis here at the ITQB. Susana and I spent some time in the lab of the Structural Biology Group at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) at the same time in 2005 (I think...), so it was great to be present at her PhD defence (and celebration :-).

After a 20 min. presentation and examination by four (out of six) members of the jury, she recieved the diploma which proves that she is now Dr. Gonçalves! CONGRATULATION!



On May 17th it was "Dia de Noruega", the Norwegian national day! I was invited to a reception at the Norwegian ambassador’s residence, and went there to celebrate the day together with other Norwegians, diplomats from other countries and guests from Portugal. It was very nice, and a good opportunity to meet other Norwegians living in Portugal.

Have a nice weekend!

My first results

During the last few weeks, I have been producing three of the proteins I'm studying during this project. They all have an iron-sulfur cluster and are therefore yellow/brownish at high concentration (see picture). One aim of my project is to analyse wheter this iron-sulfur cluster contributes with electrons in order for the protein to repair damaged DNA. One technique you can use to analyse this is Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR), and yesterday I performed the first analysis of my proteins by EPR. I don't know much about this technique yet, but I'm here to learn more about it as part of my project. From the very preliminar results we got yesterday I'm convinced we will gain new knowlegde about this class of enzymes which in the end will teach us more about their contribution for the maintenance of our genome :-) The experiment was performed in collaboration with Professor Miguel Teixeira at the Metalloproteins and Bioenergetics Unit at the ITQB.

By the way, this week the heat finally arrived, and I think it was about 28C yesterday. Unfortunately I haven't been able to enjoy it as much yet since I'm working, but during the weekend I will go the beach :-)

Have a nice weekend!

My first group seminar

The MX unit has group meetings every Wednesday at 10.00, where members of the unit present recent results or papers within macromolecular crystallography. Today it was my turn and I presented the project I have been working on for some time now, and my plans for the Marie Curie fellowship. 

Here you have a couple of pictures of crystal structures I talked about today - uracil DNA N-glycosylase (UNG) and mismatch specific uracil DNA glycosylase (MUG) from Deinococcus radiodurans (DEIRA). They were the first crystal structures of DNA glycosylases from DEIRA which were published (in 2005 and 2006), and you can read more about them by following the links!