Huge congrats to Marcin Pęziński and other members of the Synaptogenesis and Molecular Motility labs at the Nencki Institute on their latest paper on the role of Tks5 in neuromuscular junction formation. It was a huge privilege to have collaborated with them on this exciting story!

I am incredibly excited to share our latest preprint on the role of exocyst and intracellular vesicles in Gli protein accumulation at the primary cilium. Congratulations to Sylwia, who has spearheaded the project and made this manuscript a reality! Also huge thank you to all the lab members that have contributed and to Raj Rohatgi and Eric Humke from Stanford University for contributing essential data and providing insightful feedback! Keeping my fingers crossed for a speedy publication in a top journal.

Congratulations to Iliana Serifi, Thomais Papamarcaki, and their collaborators, us included, on the new paper in Scientific Reports. We show that the oncogene SET is important for Hedgehog signal transmission in vitro and in vivo using a zebrafish model and identify the Gli1-SuFu interaction as the molecular target of SET.

This month we’ve had to say goodbye to two outstanding lab members. Klaudia has just defended her MSc thesis with flying colors, and Ali will be moving to the USA to pursue a postdoctoral position in cancer research at the Masonic Cancer Center of the University of Minnesota. Congratulations to both of you! You will be missed!

Congratulations to Miriam Izzo, Joanna Kargul, and the whole interdisciplinary collaborative team from CeNT and other institutions on the new paper in Bioelectrochemistry! Tomek from our lab also contributed to the work by helping Miriam with some molecular biology work. The paper is a stepping stone for the creation of innovative bioelectrodes that in the future will be integrated into “artificial leaves”, devices for the efficient conversion of solar energy into clean electricity. I was really excited to be part of this project.

The preprint that we had posted a while back on biorXiv has finally been published! Łukasz and the team showed that the unconventional nuclear export protein Xpo7 is important in keeping Gli proteins out of the nucleus to prevent excessive Hedgehog pathway activation when there is no ligand in the environment. Xpo7 and another exportin Xpo1 work together with a major negative regulator of the Hh pathway known as SuFu. The paper used many innovative approaches, including CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis and our custom-made software for nuclear localization quantification in hundreds of cells. The paper was the culmination of Łukasz’s work as part of his FUGA fellowship in our lab. Huge congratulations to the whole team!

We published a new exciting paper on the role of Arghef5 in neuromuscular junction development in collaboration with the Prószyński lab at the Nencki Institute. The paper is open access and available here. We used a combination of in vitro work and in vivo conditional knockout studies in mice to show that Arhgef5 is essential for the maintenance of the integrity of neuromuscular junctions in aging mice. Congrats to all the authors, especially the first author Krzysztof Bernadzki, who spearheaded the in vivo work.

Brygida was awarded a PRELUDIUM grant by the National Science Centre. This grant will enable her to study Gli protein phosphorylation using a combination of innovative approaches, including mass spectrometry, bioinformatics, reporter assays, and CRISPR/Cas9 mutagenesis. Huge congrats and great job on the application!

We went out for a happy hour to Hala Koszyki, which has an amazing variety of food and beverages and a very “street food” kind of vibe. Ali volunteered to be the coordinator of these “lab eating” events from now on.

Congrats to the first author Łukasz Markiewicz and also Tomek and Sylwia on publishing our first preprint on biorXiv: Xpo7 negatively regulates Hedgehog signaling by exporting Gli2 from the nucleus. We will be submitting the paper to a peer-reviewed journal very soon, but in the meantime, the manuscript is freely available to read and comment on. If you have suggestions on how to improve the work, please feel free to e-mail me or leave a comment on the biorXiv website!