Bazzini Lab

Summer BBQ welcoming Summer and Research Scholars

Q presented a wonderful presentation on her research on dORFs at the Friday Science Club at Stowers Institute. We all celebrated her achievement at the reception following.

The end to a fantastic rotation with Dany called for a group lunch in the Stowers café.

We celebrated Q’s birthday with fun desserts and cake.

Luli celebrated her first birthday as a PhD student.

Ariel hosted the annual lab barbeque at his house. This time we were welcoming Summer Scholars Michay and Majo, and having Luli back to join the lab as a predoctoral student with the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.

Gopal’s pizza-making skills resulted in a very cute fan club during the barbeque at Ariel’s house.

Michay and Gopal were the master chefs at the barbeque.

We were honored to host a great talk about meiotic protein level regulation, by UC Berkeley’s Dr. Gloria Brar, for the Institute’s Wednesday Lecture Series.

In traditional Bazzini lab style, we had loads of cake to celebrate Michelle’s Birthday.

We were pleased to host Dr. Sujatha Jagannathan, from UC Denver, to share her lab’s interesting work on mRNA quality control.

Celebration of the acceptance of our lab’s first research paper and Q’s first first-author paper!

Q invited the lab over to celebrate with great food and even better company.

Q, along with fiancé and fellow predoc, Kai, prepared an amazing feast.

The lab had a great night, led by postdoc Gopal, learning about Indian culture and trying Indian food!

The lab went to Bo Lings Chinese restaurant, where Qiushuang, (who is from China), ordered traditional dishes for everyone to try and answered many questions about Chinese customs and culture. We are so fortunate to have such great diversity in our lab, and in the Institute.

Qiushuang spends several days doing experiments in the dark.

Predoc Qiushuang attends Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s translational control meeting, where she presented some of her work at the poster session.

Bioinformatician, Matt, gives a presentation at the Stowers 2018 Young Investigator’s Science Retreat. This annual internal retreat gives early career scientists the opportunity to present their work in a conference setting, gaining valuable experience and feedback.

Sending off our 2018 Stowers Summer Scholars with some amazing Kansas City barbecue from Q39!

Michelle presents her ongoing work using zebrafish at Stowers Open Mic Science

Celebrating the birthday of our first predoc, Qiushuang, with the Zanders lab!

Happy Birthday to one of our bioinformatics experts, Santiago!

Qiushuang presenting her research on codon optimality to the Institute at our weekly Friday Science Club

Sue Ackerman gave a wonderful talk about mRNA translation and neurodegenerative diseases.

Our old friend Antonio Giraldez came to Stowers hosted by Matt Gibson. We all had fun and shared old stories.

Our awesome AA, Bonny, is leaving us for a position with the Science Communication team. We're delighted for her but sad to see her go! Farewell lunch was giant burgers at Brickhouse.

Ariel’s daughter, Camila, shows everyone how to manage a lab meeting!

Predoctoral researcher Qiushuang Wu publishes a review in Methods titled Systems to study codon effect on post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression.

Dr. Cifuentes came to the Institute from Boston University as a guest lecturer for the GSSIMR Critical Analysis of the Scientific Literature course. He spent three days on site, with plenty of time to meet with PIs, students, and lab members.

Our shared labs had two birthdays to celebrate, which meant two desserts. The AA, Bonny, made traditional Argentinean cookies, alfajores, and master baker Mike (Zanders lab) baked a hummingbird cake.

The Stowers Institute hosted a Thanksgiving feast, and the lab celebrated by sharing a table with their lab neighbors, the Zanders lab.

Dr. Moreno-Mateos, from Yale University, came to the Stowers Institute to present his seminar, "CRISPRing zebrafish to understand vertebrate development". While here, he also spoke with students from the Graduate School and was Ariel's co-teacher at the Critical Analysis of the Scientific Literature course on Monday evening. He also joined the lab at Gates BBQ for lunch.

The lab was joined by the Zanders lab members for singing and a Chocolate Salted Caramel cake from Dolce Bakery.

We began the day with cakes for Qiushuang and continued with a farewell lunch for Amina from a favorite Middle Eastern restaurant, Sahara, sharing both with our neighbors, the Zanders Lab.

YISR is a two-day event hosted by the Stowers Institute intended to provide young scientists the opportunity for professional development, building confidence in communicating their work to others. Dr. Bazzini presented a short talk and mentored a session of talks. All members of the lab presented a poster of their research, and predoctoral researcher Qiushuang Wu also gave a talk.

After a nine-week rotation, we had to bid farewell to our Summer Scholar, Elise. In honor of her last day, we took her to the Blue Bird Bistro for a perfectly Midwestern meal of bison burgers.

Elise was the lab's first member from the Summer Scholars program of the Graduate School of the Stowers Institute, an eight-week program where students work on independent research projects under the direction of a PI. Elise's poster was titled "61 Shades of Optimality". The poster session, open to the Institute, allowed the students to present their research to a varied audience, including PIs such as Dr. Scott Hawley (left).

Santiago's talk was titled "The Rules of Codon Optimality". The goal of the series is to encourage engaging discussions between the speaker and audience.

The barbecue at Ariel's house served several purposes: to welcome predoc Qiushuang to the lab full-time, say goodbye to rotating predocs Soham and Todd and departing member Shivani, and to introduce their new puppy, a brown Newfoundland named Sully.

Mike, the famous baker from our neighboring lab, was kind enough to make a generously-sized chocolate cake for Michelle's birthday.

This series is designed for an audience of the non-science members of the Institute, challenging the PIs to explain their research in a less-technical way.

Dr. Richter is professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His talk was titled "Translational Control of Neurologic Disease". He seemed pretty happy with his first taste of "real" Kansas City barbecue at Gates Bar-B-Q.

Jackie's seminar is titled "The Hidden Genetic Code: Uncovering the Codon Optimality Mechanism".

The Bazzini lab joins forces with their neighboring lab, the Zanders lab, to honor their shared AA, Bonny, and declare her Queen for the day.

Dr. Bazzini visits the National University of Mexico (UNAM), Campus Morelos, to present a seminar to students and faculty. He also visits IFC and Ciudad Universitaria to discuss his research.

The paper from her PhD, titled Discovery of a novel oocyte-specific Kruppel-associated box domain-containing zinc finger protein required for early embryogenesis in cattle, was published in Mechanisms of Development.  Abstract

The preview for a paper is published in Molecular Cell, authors JM Hand and AA Bazzini.  Abstract

Dr. Green, from Johns Hopkins University, was an extremely popular guest. It was a day full of great meetings, capped by a fantastic seminar presentation titled Interconnections Between Ribosome Activity and mRNA Decay.

The Merry CRISPR-mas Tree was created by trimming off half the branches, adding a paper maché cas9 enzyme, large-bulb lights as the guideRNA, construction paper DNA, and a star made of microcentrifuge tubes.

Original members include Postdoctoral Researcher Jackie Hand and Administrative Assistant Bonny Moseley. Within the first year, the lab adds Research Technicians Michelle DeVore and Shivani Sharma, Bioinformatician Santiago Medina, and Graduate Researcher Amina Zemouri. We also hosted our first Predoctoral Researchers from the Graduate School of the Stowers Institute, Qiushuang Wu, Soham Karmakar, and Todd Gallagher.