Hi folks!

I have just returned from a much needed vacation and catch up with my family back in the UK. I am now back in the lab and catching up on everything that has been happening whilst I have been away.

Before I left, I didn’t quite have time to update you all on some work I had been doing (continuing) to look for proteins which bind the huntingtin protein. I searched through 9 online databases on protein-protein interactions and compiled all of the data on huntingtin together. Having all of this data in a workbook means that I (or anyone else for that matter) can easily sift through it to find a specific protein of interest or filter/sort the data into different types of rank order.

My fellow open notebooker and HDSA fellow Dr. Tam Maiuri uploaded some data on putative huntingtin interactors which might be specific to oxidative stress. I compared her findings with the data I collated and you can read all about that here. This puts HMGB1 at the top of my priority list of huntingtin interactors to investigate – more on that soon hopefully.

I also did a, not very successful, production and purification of huntingtin missing the first ~660 residues – it did not work very well at all! Back to the drawing board on that one.

More to come next week!