CSC Symposium Agenda for May 5

10 AM REGISTRATION

Coffee available in the Bojwani room. Come check out the vendor tables in the Rotunda: Perkin Elmer, Agilent/BioTek, and BioLegend.

10:30-12:30 MORNING SESSION

10:30 AM Land acknowledgement, Vicki Auerbuch Stone, Professor of Microbiology & Environmental Toxicology and CSC Associate Director. Click for more info about the land acknowledgement.

10:31 AM Welcome, Glenn Millhauser, Head of Chemistry & Biochemistry Department

10:35 AM Opening plenary, Scott Lokey, Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Faculty Director of the CSC
“UCSC CSC – a Rich and Varied History”

11:00 AM Tools & technologies update, Beverley Rabbitts, CSC Director of Operations
“Welcome to a New Era at the Fully Revamped CSC”

11:15 AM Research in progress: Jaru Taechalertpaisarn, CSC user from Scott Lokey’s lab
“Discovery of Novel Active Macrocyclic Peptides Through Permeable-First Perspective”

11:30 PM Research in progress: Aswad Khadilkar, CSC user from John MacMillan’s lab
“Assigning Mechanism of Action To Natural Products In Multiple Biological Contexts Using Gene Expression And Phenotypic Screening Methods Established By The HIFAN Program”

11:45 AM Morning keynote, Maureen Hillenmeyer, Founder and CEO of Hexagon Bio
“From academia to biotech startup: Launching a drug discovery company using new approaches in computation and automation”

12:30-1:30 PM NETWORKING LUNCH AND POSTER SESSION

12:30-1:00 PM First session – Poster presenters with last names A-L:
Abrams, Cech, Dzhanbekova, Hosseinzadeh, Hug, Jacobson, Johnson, Khadilkar, Liang, Lohith

1:00 PM-1:30 PM Second session – Poster presenters with last names M-Z:
Morris, Mitchell, Mueller, Ngoi, Rabbitts, Rubbo, Sharma, Taechalertpaisarn, Wijeratne, Yang

1:30-3:30 AFTERNOON SESSION

1:30 PM Invited faculty talk: Phil Crews, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry
“Sponge Derived Molecule Discovery, Adventures of The Three Amigos Using the UCSC CSC”

2 PM Research in progress: Cindy Liang, CSC user from Angela Brooks’s lab
“Pairing Phenotypic Assays with Direct RNA Sequencing to Understand U2AF1 S34F and Cigarette Smoke’s Functional Role in Lung Cancer”

2:15 PM Research in progress: Gerd Mueller, CSC user from Seth Rubin’s lab
“Mechanisms of cell cycle-dependent gene regulation”

2:30 PM Presentation from our sponsor, Robert Graves, Field Applications Scientist, Perkin Elmer
“Phenotypic profiling by Cell Painting and fast confocal imaging with the Opera Phenix Plus High-Content Screening System”

2:35 PM Expression of gratitude, poster prizes, and awards, Beverley Rabbitts and Scott Lokey

2:40 PM Afternoon keynote, Michelle Arkin, UC San Francisco
“Looking for the Middle Way – Innovation and Application in Academic Drug Discovery”

3:25 PM Closing remarks, Paul Koch, Distinguished Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences and Dean of the Division of Physical & Biological Sciences

 

Our industry sponsors will have the following vendor tables available throughout the day for education and networking:

PerkinElmer High Content, reagents and supplies, automation, plate readers, and bioinformatics (3 tables).

BioLegend Antibodies, proteins, and kits (1 table).

Agilent BioTek liquid handling (1 table).

We also thank our symposium sponsors at UCSC: the Office of Research; the PBSci Division Dean’s Office; Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry; Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology; Department of Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology; and the Biomolecular Engineering department within Baskin Engineering.

We also would like to thank the following supporters of the Chemical Screening Center: the Santa Cruz branch of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) and the UCSC Physical and Biological Sciences Division. We are grateful for their ongoing financial support for our daily operations, which supplements user fees to keep our staff paid and our instruments running!

the logo for QB3 at UC Santa Cruz

Save the date! May 5 is the CSC symposium

We’re excited about our upcoming UC Santa Cruz Chemical Screening Center Grand Reopening Celebration and Research Symposium! Please have a look at the formal invitation, which includes a link to register. We also have a link where anyone can make a voluntary donation to the symposium fund. The symposium will be aimed at a general scientific audience, but all are welcome to attend. And we have a link where you can buy merchandise with our symposium theme art!

Calling all presenters: If you want to apply to give a poster and/or talk, please fill out a very brief form with your presentation title by April 15. We have slots for 5 faculty talks and 5 trainee talks, as well as lots of room for posters. It will be exciting to see all the projects using our resources in one place and have some stimulating discussions. There will be prizes! The full agenda will be made available once we have the talk titles so please send yours ASAP.

a picture of a person holding a microplate in the lab, with the invite details below.

 

We have 2 amazing guest speakers lined up, not to be missed!

The opening plenary:

Maureen Hillenmeyer, PhD

CEO and Founder
Hexagon Bio

headshot of Maureen Hillenmeyer

The closing plenary:

Michelle Arkin, PhD

Distinguished Professor and Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, UC San Francisco
Director, UCSF Small Molecule Discovery Center

Photo of Michelle Arkin

Questions? Please email Beverley Rabbitts.

New chemical libraries are in!

We have two new commercial libraries to offer! 8,387 known bioactives (includes FDA-approved for repurposing) from TargetMol, in the form of 27 384-well plates (pictured to the left), and 64,000 synthetic drug-like diversity compounds from ChemDiv, in the form of 200 384-well plates (pictured to the right). Stay tuned for our daughter plating progress, which we will do using our PlateStacked Janus MDT 96-channel pipettor into Echo-compatible low-dead-volume cyclic olefin plates.

Visitors from Ono Pharmaceutical

Beverley and three Ono Pharmaceutical guests standing in the CSC lab space
Caption: Beverley showing three guests from Ono Pharmaceutical around the CSC lab space.

2022 UC DDC RFA1 LOI form screenshotThe CSC was delighted to host guests from the over 300 years old company that made the first prostaglandin therapeutic product (1974) and first anti-PD1 therapeutic antibody product (2014); both were developed with partners in academia. Their visit aimed to foster relationships with UCSC experts in oncology, neurology, immunology, and pathophysiology.

Faculty are invited to apply for 50-100k/1yr seed grants via UC DDC for drug discovery projects in these areas. To submit a project for consideration, please fill out the LOI form at the end of the RFA here (form is pictured to the right) by the end of JULY 2022 with detailed instructions available here. Ono is especially interested in funding early stage projects that involve identifying first-in-class drugs and/or drug targets. Good luck to all applicants!

We look forward to future interactions with our new friends at Ono Pharmaceutical.


Please note that we also have an opportunity for seed funds from Astellas, also through the UC DDC. You can access the application form here and read the RFA here. The due date is the end of AUGUST 2022.

Echo acoustic dispenser installed!

We’re excited to unveil our new Echo! It’s ready to use.

It is ideal for dispensing small volumes of compounds from special 384 or 1536 format source plates to a wide variety of destination plates. It does so 2.5 nl at a time, one well at a time, in a fully programable way – it takes all the manual labor out of cherry picking, dose response curves, reformatting, making replicates, rearranging, randomizing , etc. See an informational video here. Each user will be required to have pre-arranged CSC assistance to operate this until you have run it successfully on at least 5 occasions. E-mail Beverley to arrange training, a demonstration, or pilot experiment. Here are some pics of the install in progress today.

Echo being uncrated by several guys

Raghu installing Echo software

New events calendar

We now have a Google calendar for CSC events. It will have the most up to date information about any training, seminars, etc. being offered to users. We recommend that users subscribe to the CSC calendar (and its automatic alerts), as well as the CSC Google Space to get all the up-to-date information.

We’ve had several exciting events for users in the past few weeks:

  • A “lunch and learn” seminar with presentations by Beverley Rabbitts and Serena Chan from Perkin Elmer (the old flyer is below)
  • Phenix user trainings in person with Robert Graves from Perkin Elmer
  • Flex robot and PlateWorks training in person with Robert Graves from Perkin Elmer
  • EL406 user training in person with Deanna Leung from BioTek
  • Remote EnVision user training with Bill Ortiz from Perkin Elmer

flyer for 22 March 11:30am seminar on plate reader techs