2023

December

Steven had the pleasure to serve on the thesis committee of Garrett Ginell—a friend, collaborator and all-round amazing scientist. Congratulations Dr. Ginell on such a phenomenally productive PhD track!

Steven received the Frick Foundation Starting Grant in ALS Basic Research. Such an honor to be added to this list of amazing awardees with several of my mentors and role models, and a great endorsement of all the hard work by the lab on elucidating the molecular origins of neuroinflammation in ALS.

November

Steven took on the role of Departmental Commercialization Officer. In this function, Steven acts as a liaison between the department and BCM Ventures. Looking forward at helping translate basic innovations in our department from bench to bedside!

Steven had the enormous pleasure to visit UNAM in Mexico City for a lecture. Such amazing interactions with the students and blown away by all the cool work they are doing. Thank you so much Rosa Navarro and Cesar Cuevas Velazquez for the kind invite. It was great for Cesar and I to relive our old IDPSIG days.

We had a blast at the inaugural BoeyHouse retreat with our dear friends at the Holehouse lab. Fantastic scientific discussions and lots of ideas for new collaborative projects. We are already counting down the days until we get to host in Houston.

October

The lab celebrated its 1st anniversary! Here’s to many more!

We were delighted to host our collaborators Willem Vanderlinden (University of Edinburgh) and Pauline Kolbeck (LMU Munich) for a research visit here in Houston. Lots of stimulating discussions on our joint efforts to use atomic force microscopy to characterize the material properties of condensates.

Steven attended the third and final PhasAGE conference in Porto. Thanks to Sandra Ribeiro for organizing such a fantastic conference and for the kind invite. Steven presented our preprinted venom work and Sophie’s new peptide uptake data.

Steven had the pleasure to visit the VIB Center for Molecular Neurology at the University of Antwerp. Thanks to Laura Fumagalli and Sofie Meulenbergs for inviting me to their postdoc-run seminar series. It is always most fun when trainees invite you. Steven presented our work on the similarities between venom peptides and neuropathology, and for the first time shared some of Sophie’s new data on these peptides. Great to also catch up with the entire Renzo Mancuzo lab. Such a fun bunch and so much exciting work going on!

Steven had a great time attending the Biological condensates workshop at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, UK. It was fun being submerged in the physics and mathematics of condensation and share our work on condensation-prone peptides in various biological systems. Thanks Buddho Chakrabarti, Simon Alberti and Frank Jülicher for organizing and the invite!

We are so delighted to welcome Caroline Nwandu to our lab as a lab technician. She returns to academia from the biotech space and will be pushing forward our translational and stem cell projects. Welcome Caroline!

September

Our lab received a SPORE seed grant to apply our work on nuclear speckles and splicing to breast cancer. Super excited to further collaborate with the Trey Westbrook lab on these condensates as an promising therapeutic target for chemotherapy.

Steven attended the Plasticity in Biological Organization meeting at the Telluride Science and Research Center. Steven presented for the first time our work on innate immunity hijacking in neurodegeneration. Big thanks to organizers Alex Holehouse and Thomas Boothby for getting such an exciting program together.

Steven attended the 4th Structural Variants and DNA Repeats conference organized by Graham Erwin at Stanford University. It was so great to be back on campus, reconnecting with old friends and making tons of new ones. Steven talked about how repeat peptides in disease hijack natural pathways from the innate immune system. So happy that the Erwin lab is launching at BCM in early 2024!

Olivia gave a talk at the WALII symposium. She presented our recent work on the molecular determinants that engender the hydration sensitivity of FLOE1 condensation. Additionally, she gave an overview of a new exciting project in the lab where we are taking a deep dive into the biology of Houstonian resurrection ferns. Stay tuned!

August

We are super happy to welcome Gabe who joins the lab as our first lab technician. He comes from the Kallen lab at Yale and will leverage his expertise to push forward our oocyte and mouse projects. Welcome Gabe!

Paulo went on a research visit to LMU Munich to work alongside our collaborator Willem Vanderlinden. Paulo and Willem are using atomic force microscopy to precisely measure the physical features of peptide/RNA coacervates.

Anya presented her progress report for the entire SMART summer school program. She talked about how neuropathological proteins can trigger Toll-like receptors by mimicking the behavior of innate immune peptides. Great job, Anya!

July

We are super happy to officially welcome Olivia to Houston. Although being our first recruit, she spent some more time in Melbourne wrapping up her PhD work while starting already a new project on crowding and genome organization. Welcome Olivia!

Sophie was selected for the Baylor College of Medicine Clinical Translational Research program! This program aims to train the next generation of leaders in translational research. Congrats Sophie!

Steven went to the ALS GRC in Switzerland. It was so great to see so many old and new friends. Inspiring talks, exciting science, and such a wonderful community. Loads of new inspiration and cool collaborations ahead of us. Steven talked about our latest discovery linking C9orf72 to the biophysics of venom biology.

June

The TransitID paper by the Ting lab was published in Cell. Congrats Wei and Joleen! So happy we could be a small part of this fantastic paper. This expansion of the proximity labeling approaches will enable such cool experiments to study intra-and intercellular trafficking on a proteome-wide scale.

Guo-Teng joined the lab as a new grad student from the Neuroscience program. He comes from the Piatkevich lab and will leverage his expertise in synthetic biology to tackle some big questions in how protein condensation is encoded in sequence. At the same time, he is pushing forward a more translational protein engineering project. Check out this cool music+science project called Neuronal Symphony that he was previously involved in. Welcome to the team Guo-Teng!

Steven his postdoc paper on ATXN2 was just accepted by Molecular Cell. We found that poly(A)-binding protein moonlights as a bona fide holdase and chaperones ATXN2 by binding to a conserved short linear motif buried in its disordered regions. Excitingly, we find that this brand new function for this ancient class of proteins is conserved across the eukaryote lineage. We functionally validated this interaction in Arabidopsis, Capsapsora and Trypanosoma with our amazing collaborators. This study is shining a new light on how unconventional protein chaperones regulate biomolecular condensates, and we are already following up on some exciting new angles in neurological disease. The Lemke lab wrote a very thoughtful preview on our work, highlighting the open questions that remain.

More hiring news! We are delighted that Zahra will join our lab as an undergrad. Zahra is a Junior at Houston Christian University majoring in Biochemistry-Molecular Biology. She will be involved in a variety of projects on condensates in biomaterials and infectious disease. Welcome Zahra!

May

Olivia and Steven attended the first WALII symposium at Carnegie Institution for Science. We had a phenomenal time hearing about so much exciting work being done in the partner labs. Inspired and eager to get new desiccation projects started in the lab and with collaborators. It was great to meet many old friends and see several for the first time in person.

Exciting news! Pilar joins us as our second graduate student. She is an expert in studying neuroinflammation in mouse models and is already pushing forward different in vivo projects in the lab. Pilar will work on some big questions at the intersection of lipid (dys)metabolism, protein condensates and inflammation. Welcome Pilar!

Steven attended and presented a poster on the lab’s work at TAMEST. It was so exciting to get to know the broader Texas science, medicine and engineering community. Thanks Huda Zoghbi for inviting me!

Paulo gave a talk at the THINC RNA club. He gave an exciting talk on his previous work on RNA/peptide coacervate. He made a strong argument for the use of simple models that give detailed molecular insights to help illuminate the role of condensation in cellular RNA metabolism.

Steven visited the Department of Cell Biology at Emory University. Had such a fantastic time presenting our work and getting so much great feedback. Met with old and new friends, learned so much, and there are some exciting collaborations on the horizon. Thanks to Zack McEachin and Nisha Raj for hosting me. Hope to welcome you soon to Houston!

Our Chemical Reviews article with our friends at the Sukenik lab and Yanniv Dorone (now at Fall Line Capital) got published! We covered everything known about biomolecular condensates in times of water stress. While condensates are likely key actors/sensors during water stress and desiccation tolerance, little is currently known about their role in these processes. There is a vast and wild world out there waiting to be explored! Thanks to guest editors Jim Shorter and Sua Myong for including us in this issue.

We finally got the chance to welcome Paulo in person here in Houston! Paulo joined us as a postdoctoral fellow and is already setting up a wide range of projects on biomolecular condensates in physiology and neurodegenerative disease.

We had to say goodbye to our first alumnus, Pablo. He joined our lab as one the first students and worked on a translational project on infectious disease. He is now off to dental school at UCLA. Good luck in California, Pablo!

April

Pablo presented his work on high-throughput chemical screens to find new drugs that target viral condensates at the Rice Undergrad Research Symposium.

Big news! Sophie joins as our first grad student! She previously worked on cellular senescence at the Purvis lab at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sophie is interested in how the genetics of neurodegenerative disease impact protein condensates and proteostasis during aging. Welcome to the lab, Sophie!

March

Anya was selected for the Baylor College of Medicine SMART summer program! Congrats Anya!

We finally preprinted our venom paper! This story has been more than 5 years in the making. So incredibly thankful to have worked with so many amazing scientists on this. This one really took a village! You can find the preprint here: BioRxiv. In brief, we unexpectedly find that there is a strong similarity between neurotoxic peptides found in diseases like ALS and venom peptides found in rattlesnakes, spiders and scorpions. We additionally discovered several completely uncharacterized proteins that form condensates using our newly developed machine learning prediction tool. Tons of exciting stuff to follow-up on!

February

Our lab received the Pathways for Hope Pilot Grant by the Association for Frontotemporal Dementia to further push our work on neuroinflammation in ALS/FTD.

Our Zeiss LSM900 microscope with Airyscan 2 module just got delivered. So excited to start working with this new setup!

Great to see this fantastic study by the Ting lab out on BioRxiv where they developed a second proximity labeling module allowing for the measurement of protein transport within the cell using proteomics. Glad we could help with some of the stress granule and nuclear transport work and looking forward to using this technology in our own lab.

We are thrilled to announce that we have a new postdoc joining the lab! Paulo Onuchic is coming to us from the Deniz lab at Scripps. He previously worked on the role of RNA in determining the biophysical details of peptide condensates. Paulo already published his first paper in the lab as we wrote a News & Views story for Nature Chemical Biology. Welcome Paulo!

January

After last year’s Telluride condensate meeting, we wrote a review with all attendees on some of the open questions. Great to see this effort out in Journal of Molecular Biology! Thanks Richard Kriwacki and Shana Elbaum-Garfinkle for organizing and coordinating!

More recruitment excitement! No less than three fantastic Rice undergrads are joining the lab. Anya Patel and Pablo Alarcon will work in the role of condensates in (neuro)inflammation and infection. Josh Ni will study the function of an uncharacterized condensate protein we identified in muscle biogenesis/function, and is co-mentored by the Oguz Kanca lab. Welcome all!

First big news of the new year: Super excited that Fatemeh Alavi Naini joined the lab as a medical student. She will spearhead our neuroinflammation work in ALS/FTD. So much looking forward to learning from her. With her 2 years of experience in the stem cell core, she will absolutely transform the work we do in the lab. Welcome Fatemeh!

Happy New Year! Wishing all of you a fantastic 2023 full of exciting scientific discoveries.

2022

December

Steven gave a talk at the PhasAGE meeting in Brussels on our work on antimicrobial and venom peptides, and how these insights may help us better understand neurodegenerative conditions. Fantastic line-up of speakers. Always great to see new and old friends. Had such a blast! Thanks Ludo Van Den Bosch and Peter Tompa for the invite.

November

We have been interviewing a lot this month and will have some super talented young scientists joining us very soon. Stay tuned!

October

Big news! Olivia Maria Silva Carmo will be the first postdoc joining our lab. Olivia did her PhD work in the Tilley lab at University of Melbourne, where she studied the role of intrinsically disordered proteins in host-pathogen interactions in malaria. Looking forward to welcoming Olivia to Houston in the spring of 2023.

Garam Kim’s paper is just out in Cell Reports. Garam performed CRISPR screens to find novel modulators of ATXN2 levels and identified an FDA-approved and safe compound that can actually lower ATXN2 levels in vivo. Super important work for the development of new (and cheap!) approaches complementary to the antisense oligonucleotides currently hitting clinical trials. So glad to have been involved in this work.

Steven attended the “Re-imagining a cellular space occupied by condensates” workshop in Salt Lake City. Thanks to Janet Iwasa and Ofer Rog for putting together such a wonderful meeting. Great talks and discussions on how we can better visualize and educate people on condensates. Inspiring meeting!

Steven gave a talk on biomolecular condensates in biology and disease for the Huffington Center on Aging Research. Had a great time meeting a lot of new people, and getting to chat with the students. So much exciting work on aging in a variety of systems going on. Thanks for the invite Weiwei!

The Boeynaems lab is officially open!

September

Keren Lasker and Steven’s collaborative paper on PopZ is out in Nature Communications! We showed that the material properties of a bacterial condensate tune cell division. This has important implications to how condensate biophysics dictate biological function, and hints at how these features may be under selective pressure. We also re-engineered PopZ into the PopTag platform that allows one to make designer condensates in eukaryote cells. With a group of other phase separatists we are working on several leads to follow up on the biology of PopZ condensates, and are generating new sets of PopTag-derived condensates. Stay tuned!

Steven got to spend some time in Leuven. Always good to be back home! Gave two talks on our upcoming cationic peptide story: one at the Protein Aggregation Meeting organized by the SWITCH lab (thanks Joost and Frederic!), the other one at the Center for Brain and Disease Research at VIB (thanks Ludo!). Was great to see so many old friends and connect with new ones. Some really interesting discussions on antimicrobial peptides and amyloids that inspired us to revisit our data and get our AI prediction tools up an running for testing in other organisms.

Steven got to visit some science friends in Barcelona. Was fantastic to hang out with the Bolognesi and Salvatella labs at IBEC and IRB, and present our latest work on cationic peptides. Got to hear about lots of cool genetic screening approaches and exciting new work on the implications of condensates in neurodevelopment. Thanks Benni and Xavier for the invite! Had another amazing time visiting IBE and our friends at the Multicellgenome lab. Got to see their entire collection of 10 different protist species they cultivate in house! I have never seen so much cool and unexplored biology in one cell culture room. Weird modes of cell division, dormant cyst stages, crystalline cellular structures, and single-to-multi-cell transitions. So much exciting biology waiting to be discovered and to be learned from these little critters. They already helped us test the conservation of an ATXN2 regulatory switch in the protist Capsaspora (pre-print), but I am sure we will be setting up some additional collaborations after this visit. Testing desiccation tolerance of cysts will be such a valuable addition to our WALII efforts, and I cannot wait to apply our mass spec and machine learning approaches on them to search for life cycle dependent condensates. Thanks Vika, Iñaki and everyone else in the lab for hosting me and showing me all of the critters.

August

So excited to announce that the Water and Life Interface Institute (aka WALII) is live! We are a decentralized NSF center that is focused on addressing a big outstanding question in biology: how do organisms survive without water? So thrilled and humbled to be able to work alongside this amazing group of scientists. Truly an all-star team. We want to really take a deep dive into this underexplored aspect of biology, and our proposed work spans everything from biophysics to fieldwork in South Africa. Want to read more about WALII’s core mission, check out the website. We will be specifically contributing our expertise in the design of intrinsically disordered proteins and condensates to make novel water sensors. We have an open postdoc position available on the subject! Lots of applications of desiccation biology to agriculture in the age of climate change, and human health. Check out some of our previous work on the matter.

Big news! Steven got awarded a $2M CPRIT recruitment grant! Press release here. This generous funding will allow us to take the lessons we learned from neurodegenerative disease and apply them to the study of brain cancers. We are specifically interested in how biomolecular condensates are driving stress resilience and susceptibility in the tumor microenvironment. We have initiated collaborations with some top neurosurgeons at the NRI to get fresh unfrozen resection material straight from the OR to push our proteomics approaches to the next level. Been dreaming about these experiments for years. Can’t wait to get started!

Steven had an absolute blast at the Gordon Research Conference on the Neurobiology of Brain Disorders in Castelldefels, Spain. It was so much fun to present our work on the convergence of venom and antimicrobial peptides and cationic repeat peptides implicated in neurodegenerative disease. Thanks to the organizers for having me! Had a great time meeting old friends and making new ones. See you all soon!

Finally the day has come… Steven gave an IDPseminars talk! For many junior faculty members in the field this has literally become a rite of passage. Thank you so much Alex Holehouse and Magnus Kjaergaard for inviting me, but most of all for all your efforts over the years in bringing the community together on such an inclusive and welcoming platform.

July

After a year of travel and interviews, Steven is recharging with family and friends in Europe. See you again soon!

June

Steven went to the Gordon Research Conference on Intrinsically disordered proteins in Les Diablerets, Switzerland. Had a ton of fun moderating the “IDPs across the tree of life” session and presenting our latest work on cationic peptide toxicity in neurodegenerative disease and venomous animals. It was fantastic to meet so many old friends and make new ones. Can’t wait to be back in two years!

The Boeynaems lab website is live!