SEMINAR: Bayliss Seminar Series

Joel Mackay trained as a chemist at the University of Auckland and a chemical biologist at The University of Cambridge before coming to Australia to postdoc with Glenn King at the University of Sydney. Over the course of the subsequent twenty years, he has succeeded in moving a total of about 20 metres up the corridor to where he runs a laboratory that has as its main focus understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying mammalian gene regulation. His main expertise is in protein NMR spectroscopy and the analysis of protein interactions, but that hasn’t stopped the lab branching out into more areas than it probably should have. The work of his group has been recognized by a number of national scientific awards, including the Gottschalk medal from the Australian Academy of Science, the Roche medal from the ASBMB and the Prime Minister’s Life Scientist of the Year award.

A major focus of the work in my lab is to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying gene regulation - addressing questions such as what are the players involved, how do they interact with each other and how does the interplay between these interactions give rise to the functional outcomes that we observe in an organism. A significant proportion of our time recently has been spent trying to divulge the secrets of the nucleosome remodelling and deacetylase (NuRD) complex – a widely expressed and conserved 1-MDa complex that remodels chromatin to regulate gene transcription. This seminar will describe our ongoing wrestling match with this complex and the approaches we have taken to try to subdue it.