Sanders Lab News — Sanders Lab (UTSW)

March 8, 2024: We are equally excited to share that the lab’s second postdoctoral fellow, Yasmeen Khan, has arrived! David enjoyed giving her a tour of the lab space today. She will officially start on Monday, planning to lead work on RNA homeostasis in the cytoplasm.

March 4, 2024: We are excited to announce that the lab’s first postdoctoral fellow, Grigorii (Grisha) Sultanakhmetov, has officially started! He will be working on a TDP-43 project and whatever else he gets excited about tomorrow. Welcome to the lab, Grisha!

**February 16, 2024:** David enjoyed giving a flash talk to students who have been accepted into the graduate programs at UT Southwestern. He hopes that they find their visitation weekends as magical as he did when he was in their shoes!

**February 15, 2024:** Our lab space has unexpectedly become a hot spot to shoot promo commercials for UT Southwestern. Have a passion for science AND want to add a credit to your IMDB profile? Join the Sanders Lab. Where stars are born!

February 12, 2024: While they usually frown on “clubs and committees” (TM: hero of lab, Steve McKnight), The Sanders Lab is pleased to join fellow phase cultists in the UT Southwestern Condensate Club. Amazing group of labs with shared interests who meet once per month to discuss preliminary data! Much better than that so-called “Phase Group” at Princeton. Too much theory, not enough action! ;)

February 8, 2024: Thanks to Barbara Stopschinski for putting us in touch with a (for now, unnamed) brilliant clinician scientist at UT Southwestern, who is enthusiastic about contributing human samples to our neuromuscular research. A great honor! We will try our best to use these precious samples to find predictive biomarkers and treatments for debilitating muscular diseases. We are incredibly grateful for all patients who contribute to high-risk translational research!

**February 7, 2024:** David enjoyed attending the first UT Southwestern New PI Happy Hour! It was wonderful to meet so many excellent new colleagues. Thank you to Ashley Solmonson and Frankie Heyward for organizing!

February 1, 2024: David enjoyed presenting his work on polyanionic disassemblers of tau inclusions and nuclear speckles to the IDP virtual seminar series. Thanks to friend of the lab, Alex Holehouse, for the kind invite!

January 29, 2024: WITH DELIVERY OF A LIQUID NITROGEN TANK, THE LAB IS “COMPLETE”! Thank you so much to the incomparable Sandi Jo Terpack (fun fact: named P7C3) and CAND administrators for facilitating a remarkable lab launch! Another fun fact: we just learned that our confocal is in a Faraday cage. Can we do anything with this information besides fail to receive cell phone reception while imaging? And no, we will not patch clamp mTOR-treated anything. No mTOR in the Sanders Lab!

**January 27, 2024:** Vaibhav DESTROYS his first MSTP module final exam and takes advantage of the sumptuous desks of the lab to take a much deserved nap. Way to go, Vaibhav!

**January 25, 2024:** Team Nikon installs the Sanders Lab’s first microscope, a CSU-W1 SoRa, ahead of schedule. The lab quickly crushes the diffraction limit using a classic cell line created by David in 2012 (DS9 tau aggregate HEK293 cells)!
https://x.com/DavidWSanders2/status/1750928003796799582?s=20

January 23, 2024: After herculean efforts by (seemingly) dozens of people, DS-2019 visa documents are finally delivered to the lab’s first two postdoctoral scholars, Grisha Sultanakhmetov and Yasmeen Khan. Next step? These intrepid souls must navigate the complexities of their local embassies and find their way to the beautiful oasis that is Dallas, Texas.

January 10, 2024: David quickly falls out of love with the lab’s inherited P.O.S. centrifuge and throws it in the garbage. Burn in Hell, you cursed device! Throw back: https://x.com/DavidWSanders2/status/1722022024237756565?s=20

**January 2, 2024:** The Sanders Lab welcomes its first rotation student, Vaibhav Bommareddy, who journeys far from the mystical land of the medical scientist training program (MSTP) at UT Southwestern. He embraces the challenge of tackling both bench work and a daunting regimen of med school classes simultaneously. Pray for Vaibhav!

December 14, 2023: David is excited to be appointed to the Genetics, Development, and Disease (GDD) graduate program at UT Southwestern as a full-time faculty member! FYI: students do not have to be affiliated with GDD or CMB to rotate in the Sanders lab. Go umbrellas!

December 12, 2023: Our cell culture room is fully operational! Favorite cell lines are thawed for expansion and freeze down. David feels relevant again!

December 8, 2023: Michael defeats David at generating a superior Bradford standardization curve, despite only learning how to pipette three days previously. David is already irrelevant. He sulks.

**December 1, 2023:** We are excited to welcome our first research scientist, Michael Jimenez, to the lab! Michael did his undergraduate studies at Texas A&M and hopes to learn everything he can about molecular biology. David can’t wait to teach this electrical engineer a bit about the messiness of cell biology.

November 30, 2023: David is thrilled to join the Cell and Molecular Biology (CMB) graduate program at UT Southwestern as a full-time faculty member. He is even more excited that the lab can now officially take rotation students! Please come. We are lonely. :)

November 27, 2023: David is excited to join the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine (CRSM) at UT Southwestern! The lab looks forward to many productive collaborations with its cross-disciplinary faculty.

**November 7, 2023:** First packages have arrived! And we inherited our first piece of barely functional lab equipment! This item, a centrifuge of uncertain place and time, requires a three-step process to open. Fail? It chides the user with a loud "incorrect answer" buzz. Further, the user must slam the lid for it to close. Clearly, David is in love with this weathered machine. For he is a weathered machine.

October 30, 2023: David, Mel, and their fur family arrive safely in Dallas! They quickly inflate the finest Target air mattress they can (barely) afford then experience horrible back pain. Bell and Olive (cats) have declared war on each other. Peace summits are scheduled. Semi-feral cats are not easy to drive cross-country!

October 27, 2023: David and Mel are Texas-bound with two cats, two dogs, and all the essentials they could pack into their Toyota Camry. Will he survive the journey and start his own lab? Or will Mel set him on a grueling pace with meager rations before he perishes of a freak snakebite while out hunting coffee from a rest stop? Stay tuned!

October 16, 2023: David was happy to contribute to this exciting paper demonstrating that condensate interfaces can accelerate protein aggregation! Also cool to see a sharp threshold concentration for polyQ aggregation in living human cells! We are not done with SQSTM1. PB-Domainia to commence in Dallas!
https://www.cell.com/biophysj/fulltext/S0006-3495(23)00645-8

October 12, 2023: You heard it here first: manganese is not a divalent cation you can trust. It’s pretty much just magnesium spelled wrong. Now magnesium is trustworthy. Simple. Pure. Would never ruin the final days of David’s postdoc in the Brangwynne Lab. Unlike some cations.