First year Biological Chemistry graduate student Cara Loomis topped off her fall rotation in the Scott lab with a poster presented at a session for all Biological Chemistry students. We'll miss Cara while she's off on a winter rotation in the Ohi lab.

Chemical Biology graduate student Alaina Richard successfully passed her candidacy exam! A lot of hard work has set her up well for her project examining P450 enzymes that work on eicosanoids. Congratulations Alaina!

In lieu of our regular joint group meeting, in December the Scott and Rich Auchus labs made a visit to the newly renovated U-M Natural History Museum. We learned about Michigan flora and fauna, dinosaurs, and even DNA and protein folding ;-) and cells. Here is our picture inside the giant cell, which was followed by hot chocolate at Palmer Commons. A great way to celebrate the season and our collaboration.

Scott lab graduate student Aaron Bart successfully defended his Ph.D. in the Biophysics Program at UM. The work contained in Aaron's dissertation has been widely recognized, by the Journal Of Biological Chemistry, Drug Metabolism and Division, the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship. Congratulations Aaron for completing a huge body of highly significant contributions to the P450 field.

The Scott lab and friends successfully traversed the Blaze corn maize just outside of Ann Arbor. Well, at least we found stops 1-4 and 6-8 and finished with all members of our group so we could enjoy s'mores and hot cider afterwards.

Alaina Richard, a second year graduate student in the UM Chemical Biology Program and the Scott lab, has been selected as one of this year's five new participants in the NIH-funded Chemistry Biology Interface Training Program. Congratulations Alaina!

This spring/summer the Scott lab welcomed back three rotation students as new permanent lab members: Medicinal Chemistry first year students Jinghan Liu (left) and Stephen Black (middle) and Chemical Biology first year student Alaina Richard (right). At the same time senior graduate student Aaron Bart is off to Genentech structural biology for a summer internship, but he left us with a few important words of advice on the back of his shirt . . .

Third year Scott lab graduate student Sarah Burris was awarded the Medicinal Chemistry Departmental Excellence Award for Outstanding Citizenship for the 2018-2019 academic year. This award recognizes Sarah's service in the ACS Medicinal Chemistry local chapter, as student representative to the faculty, and within and beyond our lab and community. The award includes $250 and her name on a plaque outside the Med Chem office.

The Scott lab attended the Great Lakes Drug Metabolism Discussion Group meeting, a two-day event held this year in Ann Arbor on North Campus. Aaron and Simone presented posters, but everyone enjoyed the talks and opportunities to meet new colleagues in our field. We're already looking forward to the 2020 meeting in Chicago!

Postdoctoral fellow Nicole Motl attended the SSRL X-ray crystallography Rapidata course in early May. This one-week course in Menlo Park, CA is excellent training, including theory, hardware, software, and hands-on tutorials by guest lecturers and the wonderful SSRL scientific staff.

Postdoc Simone Brixius-Anderko and graduate student Aaron Bart presented their respective posters on CYP11B1 and CYP1A1 at Experimental Biology in Orlando, FL. Simone's abstract was also selected for a short talk in the Drug Metabolism and Disposition platform session. Simone's work won first place in the Division postdoc poster competition, so she will get to serve on the Division Executive Council for the next year, as Aaron has been doing for the past two years. Congratulations!

Postdoctoral fellow Simone Brixius-Anderko represented the Scott lab at the 2019 College of Pharmacy Research Forum on North Campus, sharing her structural work with CYP11B1. Her poster was titled "Structural differences in Cytochrome P450 11B Enzymes Key for Drugs Controlling Blood Pressure and Immune Responses".

Scott lab members Jinghan Liu, Aaron Bart, Sarah Burris, Simone Brixius-Anderko, and Dr. Scott spent the school day at Skyline High School teaching pipetting skills and gel electrophoresis to 9th grade biology students learning about DNA. This event was organized by MiRCore, a non-profit research organization with lots of opportunities for young people to get involved with research.

Postdoc Simone Brixius-Anderko's structure of CYP11B1 was highlighted in ASBMB Today.

Scott lab graduate student Aaron Bart (Biophysics program) was recently awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship from the U-M Rackham Graduate School. This year-long fellowship supports outstanding doctoral students who have achieved candidacy and are actively working on dissertation research and writing, particularly those working on dissertations that are unusually creative, ambitious and impactful. The fellowship includes stipend, tuition, fees, and healthcare. Congratulations Aaron!

Biophysics graduate student Aaron Bart was invited to present a talk titled "Applying Structure to Understand Cytochrome P450 1A1 Metabolism" at an internal symposium at Genentech DMPK. The visit to Genentech corporate headquarters on the South San Francisco campus included gowning up for a tour of the manufacturing process facilities.

Postdoc Simone Brixius-Anderko's paper elucidating the X-ray structure of human, cortisol-generating cytochrome P450 11B1 is the first structure of this enzyme. This complex with the breast cancer drug fadrozole showed preference for the opposite enantiomer compared to the 93%-identical CYP11B2 enzyme.