Fast and furious poster (sur)prize at the NBS contact meeting 2019

The NAT group was well represented at the annual contact meeting arranged by the Norwegian Biochemical Society (NBS), which this year took place at Røros.

Attending her first scientific conference, master student in the NAT group, Monica Hellesvik was taken by surprise as her poster was appointed 1^st place in the poster competition. Monica’s poster included a selection of the results obtained thus far in her work for the MSc thesis. Monica is working on follow-ups of the recent NATgroup-discovered actin N-terminal acetyltransferase, NAA80. Together with supervisor Henriette Aksnes, she has found some interesting additional phenotypes of the NAA80 knockout cells, which Henriette previously described as hypermotile. Monica’s results indicate that these cells also interact with their surroundings in a different way than the cells with normal expression of NAA80.

With these basal findings, the group is now ready to proceed towards experiments aiming to understand how this enzyme, or rather the lack of it, can be involved in cancer. Monica therefore gave the poster the somewhat bold title “NAA80 knockout cells: Fast and Furious?”, which was meant to convey the results in a tabloid way. The poster award committee especially liked the elegant simplicity of the poster and the effective communication of this interesting research. The poster also contained state-of-the-art images from the newest confocal at the microscope platform MIC with options for spinning disk, SRRF and TIRF.

Monica is the first in our group to try TIRF technique which is especially useful in studies of the actin cytoskeleton. Monica and Henriette plan to build these finding into a research paper together with other data obtained in the Arnesen lab and are grateful for the useful pre-peer review comments resulting from the poster session at Røros.