We celebrated acceptance of papers in JCB (Windham et al., 2024) and Contact (Miner et al., 2024) with a lab dinner at Chuy’s Tex Mex. Yum!
Cohen Lab Attends Cell Bio 2023
We had a great time at Cell Bio 2023 in Boston, MA. Sarah co-chaired a session on “Lipids in Organelle Form, Function, and Communication;” and gave a talk in the “Beyond Pretty Pictures” Subgroup, while Maria Clara, Shannon, and Sherry presented posters. A highlight was seeing Maria Clara and Sherry’s gorgeous images on the Zeiss Microscopy WOW Wall!!
Congratulations, Dr. Windham!
Lab Retreat in Saxapahaw
Cohen Lab Takes Cell Bio 2022 by Storm
We had a great time attending Cell Bio 2022, an ASCB/EMBO Meeting, in Washington, DC. Ian gave a talk and Greg, Maria Clara, Shannon, and Joey presented posters. We also ate lots of yummy food and saw the monuments on the National Mall at night!
Happy Halloween from the Cohen Lab!
We had so much fun dressing up as organelles for Halloween! Sherry is a microtubule; Greg is mitochondria; Maria Clara is a peroxisome; Alex is lipid droplets; Joey is a lysosome; Vickie is the Golgi; Shannon is a stress granule; Ian is a chloroplast; and Sarah is the ER! So much creativity in these costumes!
PS What do you call an elevator full of organelles? A CELL-evator!
Cohen and Deshmukh labs featured in CZI Medium post
Our collaborative project with the Deshmukh lab was featured in a recent Medium post describing how scientists are using a new library of stem cells with neurodegeneration-associated mutations to study neurodegenerative disease. Check out Maria Clara’s beautiful video!
Good-bye Sidney, Valerie, and Colby. We will miss you!
Today was a bitter-sweet day as we said goodbye to 3 lab members. PREP Scholar Sidney Smith will move on to a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at U Penn, while technician Valerie Dong will pursue a PhD in Animal Science at UC Davis, and undergraduate research assistant Colby Wagner will move to a Research Associate position at local company AskBio. Good luck, we will miss you!
Welcome, new students!
We are thrilled to have 3 new CBP Curriculum PhD Students joining the lab: Sherry Hsu, Alex Powers, and Vickie Williams. Sherry will study the role of tubulin modifications in positioning organelles, and how this goes awry in models of ALS. Alex will study the role of Apolipoprotein E, the largest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, in regulating cellular lipid metabolism. Vickie will study the role of membrane contact site proteins in Parkinson’s disease. Welcome!
Greg’s preprint posted to bioRxiv
Greg’s preprint has been posted to bioRxiv! Taking a deep dive into the function of the lipid droplet-mitochondria contact protein perilipin 5 (PLIN5), we show that efficient trafficking of fatty acids from lipid droplets to mitochondria during starvation requires both phosphorylation of PLIN5 and the PLIN5 mitochondrial tethering domain. Read the tweetorial to learn more.