Week....6?

Wow, I have not written on here in a while. Sorry to all my faithful readers (Vanessa).

Things have been so busy here that I have barely had a chance to sit down! With my proteins all purified and ready to go, I have been doing about two in vitro proteolysis reactions a day! That is a lot of gel, a lot of digging around in the -80C freezer and a lot of data.

A few of my reactions have turned out really well. As far as I can tell, my mutant Spx protein (G52R mutation) does not interact with the accessory protein YjbH as the wt does. What is really interesting, however, is that G52 still shows the same degradation trend as Spx in the presence of YjbH!

In vivo we see elevated amounts of G52 because it does not interact with YjbH and therefore is (hypothetically) not introduced to the ClpXP protease. Yet in vitro it is being degraded without the help of YjbH. I fear I will not be able to figure out this mystery before the summer is over, thus I will move on to new things.

Luke