News

Tamas Lazar has participated in a panel discussion on research in "Academia vs Industry" organized at the BCF Career Fare in Ghent on 23rd Novermber 2023.
Together with Marijne Vandebergh (VIB-UAntwerp CMN) they represented Academia, while Sam Massa (Precirix) and Yvonne McGrath (iTheos) represented Industry.
The debate was moderated by Alex Cloherty (BioLizard) and attracted a large audience.

Junaid Ahmed and Joris Van Lindt said goodbye to our lab this summer and fall (2023), respectively.

We are wishing them great success for their future career in industry and academia.

Cristina Marino-Buslje (Leloir Inst., Buenos Aires) will be visiting the lab from July 3 – Aug. 4, 2023.

Looking forward to having her back in our lab.

Tamas curated new degron motif instances for the APCC Dbox class, and created a new entry for Kelch KLHL12-type degrons. As of July, they are now both online in to new ELM database release.

Tamas Lazar presented a poster on degron regulation and degronons at the 1st Motif Biology Meeting: The Past, Present, and Future of Short Linear Motif Research held in Heidelberg on 21-23rd June 2023.

The conference was organized by Toby Gibson's lab at EMBL for his retirement.

Peter give a keynote talk at the Belgrade Bioinformatics Conference (BelBi 2023) on 20th June in Serbia.
His talk was titled "Targeting LLPS in disease: a new modality in drug development".

The pre-print entitled "Application of polystyrene sulfonate (PSS) for inhibiting toxicity of ALS/FTD-linked dipeptide repeats" was deposited to BioRxiv on 20/05/2023.

Congrats to all authors: Anna Bratek-Skicki, Junaid Ahmed, Karl Jonckheere, Eveline Peeters, Kara Heeren, Alex Volkov, Jelle Hendrix, Piotr Batys, Ludo Van Den Bosch, Peter Tompa

Joris Van Lindt submitted his PhD thesis with the title "In vitro Modelling of Liquid Liquid Phase Separation in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis", and first passed his private and then his public defense on 12th May 2023.

Congrats to him and his promotors, Peter Tompa and Dominique Maes.

Let us introduce Evagelos Efremidis who came from Greece to the Tompa lab for an Erasmus partical in bioinformatics on the topic of ALS/FTD. He will stay in the lab until October 2023.
He will be supervised by Tamas Lazar and Peter Tompa.

Three Argentinian visiting researchers join the Tompa lab for 3 months as part of the MSCA-RISE action: Alvaro Navarro (Leloir Inst.), Heli Magali Garcia Alvarez (UNSAM), Florencia Suarez (UNSAM)

Wishing them a nice collaboration with the group members.

Junaid Ahmed submitted his PhD thesis with the title "Unraveling the role of liquid-liquid phase separation in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and prostate cancers", and passed first his private defense and a month later his public defense on 27th April 2023.

Congratulations, Junaid!

The pre-print entitled "C9orf72-linked arginine-rich dipeptide repeats aggravate pathological phase separation of G3BP1" is available in BioRxiv.

Congrats to all authors: Margot Van Nerom, Junaid Ahmed, Tamas Lazar, Joris Van Lindt, Rita Pancsa, Dominique Maes, Peter Tompa

Tamas Lazar is leaving for a secondment to Argentina in March and he will be back by late April.
His MSCA-RISE IDPfun (https://idpfun.eu/) secondment will be on the coevolutionary analysis of short linear motifs at UNSAM, Argentina, supervised by Lucía B. Chemes.

The new NAR paper is titled "YbiB: a novel interactor of the GTPase ObgE" and is online since 2nd March 2023.
The publication process was led by first author Babette Deckers and corresponding authors Christian Galicia and Wim Versées.

Galo Ezequiel Balatti, postdoctoral researcher at UNQ Argentina, joins the Tompa lab from December 2022 to March 2023. He will work closely together with Nazanin Farahi and Peter Tompa.

Silvina Fornassari and Gustavo Parisi, group leaders at UNQ Argentina, visit our lab from early January to end of February 2023. They will work together and plan future collaborations with Attila Meszaros, Tamas Lazar and Peter Tompa.

Our lab will hosted the II. PhasAGE-VIB International Conference: "Biomolecular condensates in biology and disease" in Brussels,
from 11-13 December 2022. With close to a 80 participants, the meeting had a very vibrant atmosphere, the talks stimulated a lot of questions and the poster session was very lively.

We received a really positive feedback from the attendees.

Special thanks to Mark Lackey, our lab manager, who did the majority of the organizational work, and Peter Tompa who supervised all aspects of the event organization.

Attila Mészáros is leaving for a secondment to Argentina in November and he will be back by late December 2022.
His MSCA-RISE IDPfun (https://idpfun.eu/) secondment will be on an evolutionary analysis of IDPs at UNSAM, Argentina, supervised by Lucía B. Chemes.

Our new article on the development of a novel tandem-tag purification strategy for challenging IDPs got published in Biomolecules on 26th October 2022.

Congratulations to the authors: Attila Mészáros, Kevin Muwonge, Steven Janvier and Peter Tompa.

Tamas Lazar and Peter Tompa published a new research article in Protein Science entitled "Intrinsic protein disorder uncouples affinity from binding specificity ".

The study was in collaboration with our Hungarian sister lab led by Ágnes Tantos and the research was co-supervised by Éva Schád.

Nazanin Farahi and Fernando Durán Armenta were awarded FWO PhD fellowship grants in fundamental research.

Fernando will be supervised by Peter Tompa and Dominique Maes, while Nazanin by Peter Tompa and Remy Loris.

Congratulations to both of them!!!

Tamas Lazar got appointed to COST management committee member for Belgium (alongside of Wim Vranken) in the COST ML4NGP "Machine learning in the era of non-globular proteins".

The Tompa lab published a new review on "The evolution and polymorphism of mono-amino acid repeats in androgen receptor and their regulatory role in health and disease " in Frontiers in Medicine (Section: Translational Medicine;  Special issue: Nuclear Hormone Receptors in Cancer and Targeted Therapy).

Congratulation to the authors: Attila Meszaros, Junaid Ahmed, Giorgio Russo, Peter Tompa and Tamas Lazar.

Peter Tompa is co-author on the study launched by the Vanderplasschen lab (ULg) on understanding viral condensates of Z-alpha domain containing ORF112 in fish herpesvirus CyHV-3.
The article was published in Nucleic Acids Research on 22nd September 2022 with the title "A fish herpesvirus highlights functional diversities among Zα domains related to phase separation induction and A-to-Z conversion".

Tamas Lazar obtains VLAIO Postdoctoral Innovation Mandate for 2 years, starting in autumn 2022.

The project will focus on developing machine learning algorithms to investigate ALS condensates formed by LLPS, followed by experimental validation in othogonal assays.

Joel Roca-Martinez and Tamas Lazar co-first author the latest article of the Vranken group published in Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences on the 27th June 2022. The article is entitled "Challenges in describing the conformation and dynamics of proteins with ambiguous behavior".

Sybil Derck successfully defended her Master thesis and obtained a Master degree in Biology.
The title of the thesis: "Characterizing the influence of long non-coding rna GAS5 on the phase separation of androgen receptor"
Congratulations and good luck for your future studies, Sybil!

Peter Tompa, Tamás Lazar and Junaid Ahmed attended the BioBusiness Summer School in Amsterdam from the 27th June to 1st July in Amsterdam and Leiden.
The summer school was a great place to learn about drug development, biopharma business models, entrepreneurship, IP, negotiation, pitching, funding acquisition and venture capitals.

All three of them enjoyed the deep business insights, discussions on life science entrepreneurship trends and the networking events.

Attila Mészaros and Joris Van Lindt attended the IDP Gordon Research Conference in Switzerland from the 26th June to 1st July.
Both of them presented an interesting poster and enjoyed the conference and the opportunity to meet fellow researchers in the field.

Álvaro Navarro from Cristina Marino-Buslje's lab joins the Tompa lab for 3 months for an IDPfun secondment. Álvaro will stay in Brussels till late September and will work on the systematic analysis of cis-regulatory elements of IDPs, supervised by Tamas Lazar.

Welcome, Álvaro!

Our bioinformatics team published a new paper in Communications Biology in May 2022, entitled "Degron masking outlines degronons, co-degrading functional modules in the proteome"

Authors: Mainak Guharoy, Tamas Lazar, Mauricio Macossay Castillo, Peter Tompa.

The paper was accepted on 22nd April and published on 11th May 2022.

Tompa lab members and collaborators published a new article in RNA Biology first authored by Joris Van Lindt.

Title: F/YGG-motif is an intrinsically disordered nucleic-acid binding motif
Authors: Joris Van Lindt, Tamas Lazar, Donya Pakravan, Manon Demulder, Attila Meszaros, Ludo Van Den Bosch, Dominique Maes, Peter Tompa

The paper was accepted on 11st April and got published online on the 1st May 2022.

Peter Tompa and Joris Van Lindt were among the trainers of the PhasAGE Training School "Biomolecular condensates in cell function, aging and disease" held in Porto on the 18-22 April 2022. Fernando Durán Armenta also accompanied them and assisted to the training of the students.

Poster title: Degron masking outlines degronons, co-degrading functional modules in the proteome
Authors: Mainak Guharoy, Tamas Lazar, Mauricio Macossay-Castillo, Peter Tompa

For more information, read our full length publication that got published in the meantime.

On Nov. 8-12, our post doc in bioinformatics, Tamas Lazar, attended Elixir's BioHackathon 2021 in Spain. The hybrid event was attended by 138 face-to-face and 172 virtual participants. Working collaboratively over tables, screens and time zones on 37 projects, new data, features and many collaborations / friendships were made over the course of an intensive week of hacking. Tamas mainly worked on the projects 3D-Beacons (3D-Beacons-client) and Bio.tools (disordered proteins and biomolecular condensates subdomains).

Tamás Lázár and Nazanin Farahi collaborated on the new release of the Eukaryotic Linear Motif resource earlier this year, and the publication of the 2022 release is now published in Nucleic Acids Research.

Fernando Durán Armenta was voted "Best oral presentation" at the PhasAGE international conference on phase transitions in aging and age-related diseases in October, 2021. Congratulations!!!

Biology Master student Sybil Derck (VUB) starts her Master thesis work in the Tompa Lab. She will work under the guidance of Attila Meszaros and Junaid Ahmed, PhD researchers.
Crossing our fingers for her successful protein expression, purification and cell / molecular biology experiments.

Tamas Lazar gave a presentation at the IDPosters21 virtual webinar organized by IDPSIG and IDPseminars the for early-stage researchers (ESRs) on Sep 9, 2021.

After Prof. Rohit Pappu's keynote talk and a few short talks, Tamas and many other ESRs from our collaborators' labs gave presentations.
Tamas talked about the current progress on the Protein Ensemble Database (PED, https://ProteinEnsemble.org/).