The Lambowitz Lab recently took this picture as a going away gift to Manabu, one of our post-docs who is returning to Japan this month.
I'll introduce you to the members of the lab.
Starting on the far left standing behind the chairs:
1) Sabine is a longtime member of the lab. She came with Dr. Lambowitz from Ohio State University. She is a German scientist who's husband also works in the lab. Sabine does mostly biochemisty experiments while elucidating the mechanisms of RNA folding and RNA splicing.
2) Paul was previously a graduate student in the lab. He is now a post-doc and works on determining the molecular structure of RNAs and proteins.
3) Marta is a senior lab techician. She works predominantly on gene targeting in Xenopus laevis (the African clawed frog). Marta works closely with Fang Lei on these projects. Since she is from Italy, Marta is often asked for culinary advice.
4) Mark is another protein biochemist. He came to the lab from the University of Miami. He works with Sabine and Paul to determine the activity of proteins involved in RNA splicing.
5) Junhua recently graduated from the PhD program. She has been working in our lab to understand the localization of our protein of interest in bacterial cells. She has shown that the protein tends to be localized to the poles of bacterial cells. Since I've known Junhua she has gotten married and had her first child.
6) Lawrence is a senior lab technician who specializes in cell culture. He spends most of his time in the cell culture room performing experiments on human and mouse cells. He is an important member of the eukaryotic gene targeting project. He advises me on my cell culture experiments and helps all of us troubleshoot our experiments.
7) Jun is a Chinese graduate student who works on bacterial gene targeting. He has been very productive in developing targeting systems for various types of bacteria. His work is potentially significant for battling pathogenic bacteria to help fight diseases and bio-terrorism.
8) That's me in the back there.
9) Travis is an American graduate student who is a part of the eukaryotic gene targeting project. His experiments are very similar to mine. We both are trying to target genes in human cells and other multicellular organisms. Travis is a native Texan.
10) Joe is a recent addition to the eukaryotic gene targeting team. He came from an industry job and has recently completed his first year in the cell and molecular biology program. Joe is also trying to use group II introns to target animal genes.
11) Shanquin is a Chinese post-doc who came to the lab from a German laboratory. He works on UV crosslinking of intron RNA to RNA-binding proteins in order to determine RNA structure and RNA-protein interactions. His experiments basically consist of exposing RNA molecules bound to proteins to ultraviolet light so that nucleotides in close proximity to the protein will form covalent bonds. Determining where the protein and RNA form these bonds allows for RNA and protein structure predictions.
12) Georg is a German scientist and longtime member of the lab. He is married to Sabine. He works on the evolutionary relationships of RNA binding proteins among many other things. He also works to determine the activity of these proteins in bacterial cells. His work allows us to understand the mechanisms of RNA binding proteins and reverse transcriptase protein including the HIV reverse transcriptase.
13) Jake is a Biochemistry graduate student. He has been studying DNA target recognition by the group II intron ribonucleoprotein. His experiments are somewhat related to Shanquin's.
In the front row seated from left to right:
14) Fang Lei is a Chinese graduate student. She works closely with Marta to target genes in the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). Her experiments involve isolating nuclei from frog sperm and performing targeting of the frog genome in vitro (in a test tube). After targeting the sperm nuclei, she injects the targeted nuclei into unfertilized frog eggs and screens for intron-containing embryos.
15) Asaka and Alain are Manabu's wife and son. It amazes me that I have been here long enough for the birth of Manabu's son and to watch him grow into a little boy.
16) Manabu is a Japanese post-doc who is returning to Japan. He has been a very important contributor to the lab. He has performed significant biochemical experiments that help us understand the behavior of the group II intron RNP. He recently joined the eukaryotic gene targeting team and made great strides to push us forward in our experiments. His contributions have significantly improved my experiments and he has taught me a lot about designing my experiments. He will be missed.
17) Alexis is a new graduate student in the lab. She works closely with Jun on the bacterial gene targeting project.
18) Alan is the boss. He has put together this great group of scientists and he keeps us all on task...a huge endeavor!
19) Roland is another longtime member of the lab. He is a jack of all trades. He specializes in developing expression systems for bacteria and yeast cells. I think of him as "the book" because he is truly a resource more complete than Wikipedia. If I have a problem, Roland is the first person I think to ask.
Believe it or not, some members are not present.
Sinjong, Cheryl, Jessica, Lauren and our undergraduate techs are not pictured.
So, that's the lab.
