Granneman Lab

Sander was invited to give a talk about their latest work at the RiboClub in Canada! He’s really looking forward to it as there are a number of really interesting talks lined up for this meeting!

Ivayla is a new post-doc in the lab who will be working on one of the most pathogenic strains we have in the lab. She is an expert in post-transcriptional modification and this is her first venture into microorganisms.

Tove, a Swedish MSc student in Synthetic Biology, will be manipulating yeast to develop new ways of making expression of exogenous genes more efficient in baker’s yeast.

Liangcui Cui recently joined the lab to understand the role of RNA-binding proteins in bacteria. Her post-doctoral work will be focussing on characterizing RNA-binding proteins in pathogens.

We currently have two post-doc positions available (see Vacancies page) to work on RNA:RNA and protein-RNA interactions in prokaryotes!

If you have any experience in NGS or quantitative mass-spectrometry and are looking for a new post-doc position, please do not hesitate to contact Sander! (sgrannem@ed.ac.uk).

Deadline for applications is 5th of March 2018.

UPDATE: Positions filled!

Sander’s proposal on bacterial pathogens was awarded with an MRC Senior Research Fellowship! The lab now has five years of funding to study post-transcriptional regulation in multi-drug resistant bacteria!!

This work is done in collaboration with the Fitzgerald, Tree and Sanguinetti groups.

After 4 years of hard graft and overcoming many technical and computational challenges our pre-60S RNA structure probing paper is now online on the Nature Communications website! The first author is Elena Burlacu, a former PhD student from my lab. We have mapped the structural changes that take place during early 60S assembly and could show that folding of some regions in the 60S pre-rRNA takes place at very specific stages of maturation.

We developed a much improved version of our CRAC protein-RNA interaction technique and identified a role for the Nab3 transcription terminator in controlling expression kinetics of stress-responsive genes. This work was done in collaboration with UVO3 and Guido Sanguinett’s group, who made a great contribution to the modeling part of the paper.

The brand spanking new super duper UV cross-linker that we developed for kinetic CRAC can be ordered from UVO3!!

In collaboration with Guido Sanguinetti’s group we developed new statistical algorithms for calling modified nucleotides in high-throughput RNA structure probing data. These new tools greatly increase the sensitivity of RNA structure probing methods, even at low coverage. The next challenge is to modify this method so that we can use it to determine which nucleotides undergo conformational changes under different conditions or during assembly of large macromolecular complexes, such as the ribosome. Can’t wait!!

The lab has been collaborating with Ross Fitzgerald’s group at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh for a while now to study RNA-binding proteins in nasty bugs. Now that I am an associate scientist at Roslin, we will be able to interact with many experts in infection and immunity and we will have access to the amazing facilities at the institute! This should greatly benefit our research and will help us to expand into new and exciting research areas.

Stuart McKellar, a Wellcome-Trust funded PhD student, has decided to join my lab to work on some very nasty bugs! This work, in collaboration with Ross Fitzgerald’s group in Roslin and Jai Tree in Sydney, promises to unravel new layers and mechanisms of gene regulation in nasty bacteria!