Thanks to the Ono Pharma Foundation and The University of Chicago for supporting this amazing symposium! And congratulations to the Weeks lab's own Sopo Jalalishvili for winning a poster prize for her work on phospholyases! 👩🔬🧪@uwbiochem.bsky.social
Only 102 public comments so far on the biggest threat to publicly funded science in my lifetime. Please comment if you can. I know this sounds like "vote harder" but we have to keep fighting www.regulations.gov/document/OMB...
Excited to share our lab's latest preprint, led by graduate student Minhee Lee, with contributions from former undergrad Zijing Wang and grad student Andrew Johns!
We show that substrate specificity information coupled with AF3 models can be used to design selective tyrosine kinase inhibitors.
Excited that our paper on enzymatic bromination of peptides is now online at ACS Chemical Biology! Led by Haley Bridge, we showed that the flavin-dependent halogenase RebH and its variants can be used for late-stage chemoenzymatic diversification of bioactive peptides: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Super excited that our SEE-CITE photoaffinity labeling method is now out in @natchem.nature.com rdcu.be/ffBSC. Here we introduce a custom silyl ether cleavable linker between a diazirine photocrosslinker handle and molecules of interest to streamline site-of-labeling analysis for PAL chemoproteomics
🚨 excited to share our latest preprint on bioRxiv, led by the soon-to-be Dr. Guy Kunzmann!
We tackle a striking case of conditional dependence on UFMylation, a UBL modification pathway whose contributions to cell fitness have been a bit of a "black box." 🧵
Congratulations to my student Dennis Bolshakov and his coauthors @weix.us, Tommy, and @born2raisecell.bsky.social on making the cover of ACS Synthetic Biology! A great paper and an awesome cover 🥳 pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Huge congratulations to my student Rohith Rajasekaran @born2raisecell.bsky.social (now a postdoc in Kole Roybal's lab at UCSF) on being selected for a Weintraub award! Super proud of you and all the work you've done!
Some excellent preLights to end 2025 🎆
The latest was written by Zhang-He Goh @goh-zhanghe.bsky.social, discussing an enzymatic method for tryptophan-specific bromination described in a recent #preprint from the lab of @amyweeks.bsky.social.
#preLight ⬇️
prelights.biologists.com/highlights/e...
Flavin-dependent halogenases (FDHs) provide a biocatalytic approach for the site-selective halogenation of aromatic compounds, but their use in late-stage functionalization of peptides has remained li...
Ready, set, brominate: RebH and engineered variant for bromination of peptidyl-Trp residues
prelights.biologists.com
Amy Weeks
Amy Weeks
Craig Kaplan
Neel Shah
Keri Backus
Jason Cantor
Scott Coyle
Scott Coyle
Great momentum at 2026 Chicago Chemical Biology and Therapeutics Symposium, hosted by CCBT at The University of Chicago and Ono Pharma Foundation. Insightful presentations and meaningful interactions drove the success of the meeting. Grateful to all attendees! ccbt.bsd.uchicago.edu/events/
preLights
Substrate-derived peptides for selective covalent inhibition of protein tyrosine kinases https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.11.724146v1
Dynamic UFMylation governs cellular fitness by coordinating multi-organelle proteostasis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.27.714830v1
Huge congratulations to the recipients of the 2026 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award! These twelve exceptional graduate students exemplify the bold, creative, and pioneering spirit embodied by Dr. Hal Weintraub. www.fredhutch.org/en/news/rele...
