Special thanks to Dongping Zhong, who is organizing a special issue of Photochemistry and Photobiology in honor of Aziz Sancar, 2015 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. While Aziz was recognized by the Nobel committee for his contributions to the mechanistic description of DNA repair by nucleotide excision repair and photolyase systems, his legacy continues with study of cryptochromes, photolyase homologs that are essential for circadian timekeeping. Alicia, Jenny and I had fun putt

Alicia and I just got back from an amazing EMBO meeting on Molecular Machines. In addition to tooling around Heidelberg, we got to see some amazing talks from Babis Kalodimos, Lewis Kay, Remco Sprangers, Nenad Ban, Bridget Carragher and more... really inspiring, beautiful biochemistry and structural biology.

Alicia Michael presented her work on an integrative computational and structural biology model of the CRY1-CLOCK-BMAL1 complex at the Center for Circadian Biology Fall Workshop on Nov. 11th. Congrats to Alicia for winning the coveted trainee speaking slot in the upcoming Center for Circadian Biology Symposium next February!

A big high five to UCSC colleagues Glenn Millhauser and Michael Stone for our collective efforts to get a new LC/MS system for high-resolution mapping of protein complexes by crosslinking-mass spectrometry (XL-MS). Thanks to the NIGMS for the equipment supplements to our grant that made this exciting purchase possible.