Ed and several members of the group presented their work at FASEB’s Protein Lipidation Conference: Enzymology, Signaling and Therapeutics 2019

Dr Tom Lanyon Hogg won 1^st prize for his talk on the group’s recent research targeting the Hedgehog signalling pathway, which promotes growth in certain cancers. The enzyme Hedgehog acyltransferase (HHAT) lipidates Hedgehog proteins and is required for signalling activity. The Tate group have synthesised and analysed several small-molecule HHAT inhibitors, and used a range of chemical biology methods to identify one compound, RUSKI-201, as the only on-target inhibitor reported to-date. The group has further developed various assays to screen for new HHAT inhibitors using click-chemistry or microfluidics and recently reported a novel assay to screen against any lipid transferase enzyme by exploiting the lipid itself. This method has greatly expedited studies of HHAT.

Dr Wouter Kallemeijn presented his work on the validation and invalidation of chemical probes for the human N myristoyltransferases which was recently published in cell chemical biology.

Final year PhD student Nattawadee Panyain gave a talk and presented a prize winning poster on her work on dual chemical probes that enable quantitative system-wide analysis of protein prenylation and prenylation dynamics

Dr Tony Ocasio was also awarded a prize for his poster on developing chemical genetic tools to expand the substrate scope of individual members of a family of integral transmembrane palmitoyl acyltransferases or zDHHCs.

Congratulations all!