December 5, 2023 – Proud to see our trainees present their work at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). Leyla gave a really polished and clear talk in the “Emerging Technologies to Study Cellular Dynamics” minisymposium. Joshua and Noah had quite the audience for their posters!
October 30, 2023 – Leyla presented her work developing a FLIM-FRET approach to monitor protein interactions within membrane-less condensates to the RNA community in the Texas Medical Center. She did an excellent job to communicate the concepts, approach and results, which fostered rich discussion and great questions. Importantly, RNA club gave Leyla the opportunity to hone her talk for ASCB in December!
September 15, 2023 – Awesome news! Leyla’s abstract for the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) was selected for a 12-minute talk with 3 minutes of Q&A. The lab will be in Boston to support her on December 2-6.
July 19, 2023 – We have our first NIH grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences! This grant will provide $1.25M in funding over 5 years to support our research on elucidating the factors and function of ER contact sites with membrane-less organelles! We celebrated with Brazilian BBQ!
June 6, 2023 – Today was the end of an era. Zach Ralston has been a huge personality and contributor since the lab’s inception. His sense of humor, diligence, dedication, joy for science, and team-oriented mentality will certainly be missed and impossible to replace. We wish him luck on his path in medicine!! We celebrate with some Southern food and cocktails at Lucile’s!!
January 20, 2023 – Fantastic news! Joshua submitted the first abstract of the lab for the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and he was selected to give a 12-minute talk with 3 minutes of Q&A. This will be his first ever presentation at a national/international meeting, and the lab will be in beautiful Seattle to support him on March 25-28.
December 22, 2022 – Christmas presents arrived early for the lab! We now have the ability to resolve different fluorophores based on their fluorescence lifetimes, which allow us to simultaneously image up to 8 fluorescent proteins. Our new FLIM capabilities also allow us to assess changes in protein-protein interactions in live cells using Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET).
September 9, 2022 – Happy one year anniversary to Josh, our energetic postdoc! We celebrated with our first joint lab happy hour with the fun Benham-Pyle team!! Some good chatter over cocktails, beer, and tasty appetizers!
August 31, 2022 – We got to celebrate Paola’s birthday over korean BBQ and soju! Paola has been a bright presence in the lab for her first few months here. She has made such a positive and immediate impact to the group!
June 1, 2022 – We’re excited to have Paola and Noah join the team! Paola just graduated from the University of Oklahoma and is joining us as a research technician. She will be searching for factors that regulate contact sites between the ER and P-bodies. Noah is joining us as the first graduate student of the lab. He will be investigating mechanisms regulating the crosstalk between mRNA translation and mRNA silencing at the ER-condensate interface.
January 13, 2022 – Ana Garcia-Saez and team published a beautiful story showing physical interactions between Bax and Drp1 on mitochondrial membranes during apoptosis. This interaction plays a critical role in mediating the release of cytochrome C into the cytoplasm to potentiate the cell death cascade. Jason’s development of the dimerization dependent fluorescent biosensors (ddFBs) to resolve endoplasmic reticulum and processing (P)-body contact sites overlapped with Raquel Salvador-Gallego’s (Ana’s PhD student) time in the Voeltz Lab. Our collaboration fostered the use of ddFBs in the spatiotemporal resolution of Bax and Drp1 interactions on mitochondrial membranes upon the initiation of cell death. Check it out at EMBOJ!
January 1, 2022 – Happy New Year and great news! Joshua Marcus, Ph.D. gave an excellent presentation of his preliminary studies in the J. Lee Lab and was selected to a one year appointment with The Precision Environmental Health Sciences (TPEHS) T32 Fellowship Program with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Joshua will be studying the effects of environmental stress on cytoplasmic organization with a focus on interactions between the endoplasmic reticulum and stress granules.
December 15, 2021 – Jason combined work and play to drive the lab’s 85! samples to our collaborator in San Diego. There, he met his partner and daughter to spend several days at the beach to celebrate their daughter’s 3rd birthday. Pictured is moonset (City of Rocks State Park, New Mexico), which was captured on his solo drive back to Houston.
J. Lee Lab