Congratulations to Arjun Garapaty (undergraduate) and Kaitlyn Szalay (SURP scholar, 2021) for winning NSF GRFP awards. Arjun is graduating from UC Berkeley in May, and Kaitlyn is a PhD candidate in the Chatterjee lab at Boston College. Congratulations to Alex Solivan (graduate student), Isaac Garcia… Read More »C-GEM students receive NSF GRFP award and honorable mentions
On Wednesday, C-GEM talked to Dr. Sofia Garakyaraghi, Associate Publisher for ACS Publications, and Dr. Megan Hochstrasser, Director of Publishing at Arcadia Science. Dr. Garakyaraghi provided a perspective on the traditional publishing system, while Dr. Hochstrasser talked about her role at a biotech startup looking… Read More »Recap: C-GEM Chats Careers in Scientific Publishing
On Saturday, C-GEM helped kick off the 12th annual Atlanta Science Festival at Georgia Tech’s Celebrate STEAM day. Over 5,000 attendees came to Georgia Tech to try hands-on activities for all ages, covering topics like robotics, biology, space, art, and more. Our booth featured MaryAgnes… Read More »C-GEM brings polymer science to Atlanta Science Festival
C-GEM researchers developed a novel post-translational backbone editing reaction to replace a peptide bond with a C-C bond as diketones and heterocycles. This general strategy provides the first example of a C–C bond forming reaction to take place within the peptide backbone, as well as… Read More »Peptide Backbone Editing via Post-Translational O to C Acyl Shift (JACS, 2025)
C-GEM researchers found that a single atom change on tRNA—O to S on the 3′ terminal adenosine—does not hinder regular translation. Changing the 3’ oxo-ester on tRNA to a more reactive thioester had the potential to impact translation positively or negatively at multiple steps in… Read More »Thioesters Support Efficient Protein Biosynthesis by the Ribosome (ACS Cent Sci, 2025)
C-GEM researchers investigated whether preventing the binding of ribosomal protein bS1 could improve ribosome orthogonality. A current, common strategy for generating orthogonal ribosomes involves controlling mRNA and ribosome interactions by modifying the Shine-Dalgarno and anti-Shine-Dalgarno sequences, the sequence that sits upstream of the start codon… Read More »Role of Ribosomal Protein bS1 in Orthogonal mRNA Start Codon Selection (Biochemistry, 2025)
C-GEM researchers developed a fast, simple, and generalizable method to assay aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase activity by detecting the acylated tRNA product using liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry. C-GEM first developed this method as a way to identify aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase enzymes that accept non-α-amino acid substrates even at extremely… Read More »Direct and quantitative analysis of tRNA acylation using intact tRNA liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (Nat Protoc, 2025)
C-GEM published a new paper in Nature Communications in collaboration with the Innovative Genomics Institute. Our researchers developed an RNA language model to predict mutations that could lead to improved structural stability. This model was used to predict mutations that could lead to improved thermostability… Read More »RNA language models predict mutations that improve RNA function (Nat Commun, 2024)
Congratulations to C-GEM SURP alumna Anika Accomando for winning a travel award to attend ABRCMS! She presented a poster on the research she did over the summer in Senior Investigator Scott Miller’s lab, mentored by Taylor Dover (graduate student, Yale).
Congratulations to Arjun Garapaty (undergraduate, Schepartz lab) for being awarded a travel award to attend NDiSTEM this past weekend! Arjun did a great job presenting his poster and won a poster award for his work. Well deserved, Arjun!