Peak Proteins Welcomes Evie Rejnowicz
Peak Proteins welcomes Evie Rejnowicz who joins us as a Protein Purification Specialist. Evie returns after completing her PhD. She joined Peak Proteins as an Intern student in 2019 and we are very pleased to have her back!
A Graduate in Medical Biochemistry
After studying Medical Biochemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Leicester, Evie went on to gain a master’s degree at the University College London. The title of her dissertation was “The Role of RAF Isoforms in MAPK Signalling Pathway Activation”.
Internship with Peak Proteins
In November 2019, Evie joined Peak Proteins for a 4-month internship during her third year of a PhD at the University of Leeds.
The internship was coordinated by the Medical Research Council DiMeN Doctoral Training Partnership. The partner institutions (Universities of Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, and Sheffield) are core members of the Northern Health Sciences Alliance, which confronts stark North-South disparities in the rates of chronic disease, poor health, and early death in a population of >15 million.
The partnership provides up to 30 fully funded studentships across the partnership per year, focussing on the complementary themes of Genetic Influences on Health, Ageing and Disease Bioinformatics and Personalised Medicine.
All MRC-funded students registered within the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle, and Liverpool are eligible to apply, including all core DTP students, MRC industrial CASE students, MRC Unit, Institute, Centre or Partnership students and MRC Clinical research training fellows.
The award included opportunities to receive training within industry.
Evie worked with Dr Steven Harborne to help develop membrane protein workflows and case studies. Her work involved expression, purification, and biophysical characterisation of several membrane protein test cases of various fold and function, including human GPCRs and bacterial multi-drug resistance transporters. Read Steve and Evie’s blogs here.
Researching for a PhD
After her internship, Evie left Peak Proteins in March 2020 just before the Covid19 lockdown in the UK. “I didn’t get back into the laboratory until October 2020 and finished my PhD in December 2021”.
Evie’s re-joined Professor Richard Bayliss’ laboratory at the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Leeds, and her PhD focused on characterisation of N-terminal region of N-myc, called transactivation domain (TAD). N-myc is notoriously deregulated in paediatric cancers, and the efforts to pharmacologically target this protein have been unsuccessful, with the main challenge being the lack of a stable structure. Evie used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and the versatility of this technique also established structural propensity, internal dynamics and interactions between N-myc TAD and its putative partners.
Evie has gained extensive experience in recombinant protein expression and purification, utilising both E. coli and insect cells for protein expression. She also carried out isotope-protein labelling and various biophysical assays assessing putative interactions.
Working for Peak Proteins
Evie commented, “I have been working in academia for a few years and I enjoyed working for Peak Proteins and am looking forward to working with the team again.”
Dr Derek Ogg, Chief Scientific Officer, and Protein Crystallographer, commented, “We are extremely happy to welcome Evie back to join us again at Peak Proteins after she previously spent a 4-month internship with us in 2020 as part of her PhD. Evie will initially join the team to work on a new project and be responsible for generating a number of target proteins destined for X-ray crystallography”.
