The Link lab had an eventful summer! Check out the publications page for new papers from Truc on the uptake mechanism of ubonodin and from Hader on a new kind of RiPP, fuscimiditide. We also said goodbye to our sabbatical visitor Danielle Guarracino as she headed back to TCNJ. Best wishes to all in the new school year!

With the end of the academic year and beginning of summer, there are some personnel changes in the Link lab to report! Postdoc Hader Elashal finished her time in the lab and took a position at NJ Bio. Senior Monica Patiño graduated and started a job at Stemloop, Inc. Congrats to both Hader and Monica! This summer we welcome two members of the class of 2023, Arthur Acuña and Kelly Gallagher, for summer research and their senior thesis. Read more about Arthur and Kelly on the people page.

We are delighted to welcome Angela Zhu, a first-year CBE grad student to the Link lab. Read more about Angela on the people page.

Truc and Jamie's Perspective article on protein engineering and RiPPs has been accepted at Biochemistry!

Hendrik's paper on new strange conformers of benenodin-1 has been accepted at Chem. Eur. J! A fun collaboration with the Wühr group.

Some personnel changes to start off the new school year. We said goodbye to Hendrik Schröder as he went back to Germany. You will be missed! The Link lab welcomes sabbatical visitor Danielle Guarracino from TCNJ and mol bio rotation student Sarah Kwartler. Read more about them on the people page.

Two big new papers from the lab came out this summer. Li and Moshe led a paper in JACS about aspartimidylation in lasso peptides, and Hendrik's main postdoc project on mechanically interlocked peptides came out in Nature Chemistry. Take a look at publications page for more details.

Welcome to Monica Patiño '22! Monica will be carrying out her thesis in the Link lab and is starting in the lab this summer. See more about Monica on the people page!

Congratulations to Jane and Nathan for graduating in this most unusual of school years! Jane will be returning to Princeton for an M.Eng. degree while Nathan will be starting a job at SpaceX.

Welcome to Jane Brown '21 who will be joining us this summer remotely as a Stoll fellow. Jane will also be continuing in the lab this fall for her senior thesis research. See more about Jane on the people page!

Congratulations to Link lab senior thesis students Maggie Orlova, Devorah Saffern, and Megan Whitley on their graduation from Princeton!

Welcome to the newest Link lab members! Truc Do joins us as a postdoc after completing her PhD with Suzanne Walker at Harvard. Basira Daqiq is a visiting student from Smith College where she works with Princeton alum Sarah Moore. See more about Truc and Basira on the people page.

A new year means new graduate students! Welcome to Drew Carson, Brian Choi, and Alina Thokkadam as the newest members of the Link lab! Alina earned her bachelor's degree from Rutgers, Brian earned his from Berkeley, and Drew comes to us from Penn State. Read more about them on the people page.

Our latest paper is out at ChemBioChem. We discuss a new antimicrobial lasso peptide, ubonodin, that has an unprecedented structure and potent antimicrobial activity against some pathogenic Burkholderia strains including B. cepacia and B. mallei. The work was led by recent PhD graduate Wai Ling Cheung-Lee with important contributions from Link lab alumni Madison Parry '18 and Chuhan Zong *18, Alex Jaramillo and Seth Darst at Rockefeller, and Riccardo Russo and Nancy Connell from Rutgers Medicine. Read the paper here and see also a writeup about ubonodin as part of Celebrate Princeton Innovation here.

Just accepted at ACS Chemical Biology is our paper on pandonodin, the largest lasso peptide ever experimentally described at 33 aa. Besides being a really big peptide, it also has some unusual solubility features and a really robust disulfide bonded macrocycle. Read the paper here. Congrats to Wai Ling and Li on a really neat story!

Wai Ling successfully defended her dissertation today and is now Dr. Cheung-Lee! She will start a job at Merck in the biocatalysis group soon.

Welcome to the three CBE seniors who are carrying out their thesis in the Link lab: Maggie Orlova, Devorah Saffern, and Megan Whitley. Read all about them on the people page!

The postdoc population of the Link Lab has tripled overnight...welcome to Dr. Yi Zhang and Dr. Hendrik Schroeder! Yi completed his PhD at the University of Florida studying microviridin biosynthesis with Yousong Ding. Hendrik completed his PhD on mechancially interlocked molecules in Christoph Schalley's lab at Freie Universitat Berlin. Read more about them on the people page.

Our review article on innovations and discoveries in lasso peptide genome mining is online as part of a special issue for the Journal of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology. Check out the paper here.

Commencement day at Princeton! Frank and Joe came back to get hooded by Jamie and collect their PhDs while Moshe and Annie graduated with an AB in Chemistry and a BSE in CBE, respectively. Congrats to all!

Our latest paper on a new antimicrobial lasso peptide, citrocin, is out at JBC. This effort was led by Wai Ling with excellent contributions from Madison Parry '18 and Alex Jaramillo from Seth Darst's lab. Congrats to all, and read the paper here.

Jamie is back from a fun day giving a seminar in the chemical biology series at Rockefeller. Thanks to Seth Darst for hosting!

Joe Koos defended his dissertation today and is the latest Link lab PhD! Congratulations to Dr. Koos! He will be starting a job at enEvolv in Boston in February.

Our collaboration with Seth Darst's group is out at PNAS today. Crystal structures of RNA polymerase bound to the antimicrobial lasso peptides MccJ25 and capistruin. Our ability to make brominated derivatives of MccJ25 with unnatural amino acid mutagenesis was critical for solving the structure. Read more here.

The newest member of the Link lab is Li Cao, a first-year CBE grad student and an NSF fellow. Li carried out his undergrad work at UC Berkeley. Welcome Li!

Happy new year to everyone! Frank's paper about ParST, a novel toxin-antitoxin system, was recently published at PNAS. Some highlights of this work are 1) the ParST toxin-antitoxin system is incredibly widespread, hanging out in the genomes of ~16% of all sequenced bacteria. 2) The ParT toxin is a novel example of an ADP-ribosyltransferase. 3) ParT exerts its toxic activity by modifying an essential enzyme in nucleotide biosynthesis. Read more here.

Joe's paper on a new lasso peptide, fuscanodin, is out at JACS today. Fuscanodin has an unprecedented Trp at its N-terminus, but it also unthreads in organic solvents. Most importantly, the fuscanodin biosynthetic enzymes behave well in solution, allowing for the first ever measurements of the kinetics of lasso peptide biosynthesis. Read all about it here.

Jamie is back from the 4th International Conference on Circular Proteins and Peptides in Kawasaki, Japan. A great conference and a great locale!

Hader Elashal joins the lab as a postdoc. Hader carried out her PhD in chemistry at Seton Hall with Monika Raj. Welcome Hader!

CBE undergrad Annie Wang joins the Link lab for senior thesis. See more about Annie on the people page.

Frank Piscotta defended his dissertation today and is off to a postdoc at Rockefeller University with Sean Brady. Congrats to Frank!

Theo Yang, a SURF student from Caltech, will be working in the lab this summer. See more about him on the people page. Welcome Theo!

Welcome to Heather White, a rising senior from the department of Biomedical Engineering at Mississippi State. Heather will be working in the lab this summer as part of the PRISM/PCCM REU program. Read more about Heather on the people page.

Jamie is back from a trip to the Netherlands where he gave the keynote address at the Dutch Peptide Symposium and also had a great visit at the University of Amsterdam. Many thanks to Jan van Maarseveen for hosting!

Graduation day at Princeton! Chuhan Zong *18, now working at Merck, received her PhD. Senior thesis students Madison Parry '18, Michelle Richardson '18, and Danielle Taylor '18 received their BSEs. Madison will be joining Merck, Michelle will be working at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, and Danielle is off to do a master's degree at Duke. Congratulations to all on your achievements and stay in touch!

Another paper from our collaboration with Monika Raj is out at Angewandte Chemie. Check out the publications page for more details!

Jamie is back from a visit to Peking University where he gave two talks. One talk in the soft matter seminar series was about lasso peptides as rotaxane building blocks. The other was part of the Peking University/UC Davis 10+10 Plus symposium and focused on the group's work in lasso peptide genome mining and enzymology. Thanks to Prof. Wenbin Zhang and all of his group members for being amazing hosts!

Jamie will be promoted to Professor effective July 1!

Wai Ling has won the Dodds Fellowship from Princeton! This honorific fellowship will support Wai Ling's dissertation year studies on antimicrobial lasso peptides.

Jamie and Joe are back from giving talks at the ACS National Meeting in New Orleans. Lots of fun to talk about new work and see old friends!

Jamie gave a talk at the GTCBio Conference on Enzymes in Drug Discovery in San Diego. It's always nice to escape to California in February!

New members in the Link Lab! Larry So is a first year CBE grad student who received bachelor's and master's degrees from Cambridge. Moshe Beiser '19, a chemistry undergrad, and Isabel Hsu '19, a molecular biology undergrad, have joined the lab for their thesis work. Welcome to all, and read more about them on the People page.

Chuhan is the latest PhD graduate from the Link lab! Congrats Dr. Zong! Chuhan will be starting a job at Merck in February.

Our latest paper is accepted at ChemComm. It's our first foray into Streptomyces for studying a lasso peptide with an obligate acetylation. We collaborated with Monika Raj, now at Auburn University, on this project. Read the paper here.

Jamie is back from giving a seminar at the University of Delaware. Thanks to Catherine Grimes for hosting!

Our latest paper has been accepted at JACS. It's about a lasso peptide that switches between two different threaded shapes when heated. It also taught us some neat new things about our favorite enzyme, lasso peptide isopeptidase. Read it here. Congrats to Chuhan, Michelle, and Jason on a great paper!

Jamie is back from giving a talk at the American Peptide Society conference in Whistler, British Columbia. Such a beautiful place for a conference, and the talks were fantastic too!

Graduation was today, and four new Link Lab alums are part of the Class of 2017! Shubham Chatterjee will be working at Boston Consulting Group, Aastha Chokshi will going to med school at NJMS, Garrett Skrbich will be working at Pfizer, and Aded Yako is off to dental school at Columbia. Congrats to all and please stay in touch!

We've been collaborating with Satish Nair's lab (Illinois) on the structure of the lasso peptide isopeptidase, an enzyme that specifically cuts open lasso peptides. Read all about in JACS.

The Link Lab is now on Twitter. Follow us: @ajlinklab

A couple of new exciting papers have come out. Wai Ling's photocrosslinking work on the lariatin system was published at ACS Central Science a few weeks ago and Caitlin's lasso peptide catenane paper was accepted at JACS this week. Check them out: lariatin and catenane.

Our collaborative paper with Andy Ferguson on lasso peptide unthreading was published today at ACS Chemical Biology. Check it out here if you want to see how slipknots unthread at the nanometer scale. The work in our lab started out as Maria Chen '14's thesis, continued as Nini Le '15's thesis, and finished by Caitlin Allen. Alex Trick worked on the computational aspect in Andy's lab at Illinois for his undergraduate research.

A new semester means new senior thesis students. Welcome to Aded, Garrett and Shubham from CBE who are joining Aastha from MOL for their senior thesis in the Link Lab.

Caitlin successfully defended her thesis today. Congrats Caitlin!

Congratulations to the newest Link Lab alumni who graduated today: Kenny, Caroline, Jason, Chad, and Lawrence! Stay in touch, and you're always welcome in Hoyt Lab!

Our paper on lasso peptide isopeptidase substrate specificity has been accepted at JBC. Congrats to Mikhail, Joe, Bozhena, and Chuhan! Read the paper here.

Chuhan and Mikhail's paper on lasso peptide fusion proteins has been accepted at ACS Chemical Biology. Check it out here.

We have 5 members of the class of 2016 doing their senior thesis research in the lab: Caroline, Chad, Jason, Kenny, and Lawrence. Read all about them on the people page!

Undergrads Caroline Kim (Class of 2016, mol bio) and Cat Nguyen (Class of 2017, CBE) have joined the lab for summer research experience. Welcome!

Alan's paper on the ERK/Capicua interaction has been accepted at PNAS! Congrats, Alan. Read the paper here.

Congrats to Nini Le, Ariel Kunkel, and Caitlin Wood, who graduated today! Please stay in touch as you move on to bigger and better things!

Welcome to Chad Wangsanuwat '16 and Steven Tsai '17 who are carrying out independent work in the lab this spring.

Some personnel changes in the group: Mikhail has successfully defended his thesis! Congratulations Dr. Maksimov! Mikhail has been working at Illumina since November 2014. Also, first-year grad student Wai Ling Cheung has joined the group. Welcome Wai Ling!

Our paper with the Liu lab at Texas A&M has been accepted at ChemComm. This paper merges two long-standing interests in the lab: lasso peptides and noncanonical amino acids. Read it here.

Diya, Frank, and Siyan's paper on protein stapling has been accepted at ChemComm! Read all about it here.

Our group welcomes two high school students for the summer: Akhil Dondapati and Karen Zhang. Akhil is a rising senior at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South and Karen is a rising senior at the Lawrenceville School.

A bunch of Link lab senior thesis students graduated. Cathy Chen is headed to medical school at the University of Mississippi, Maria Chen is pursuing an MD/PhD at Baylor, Bozhena Lisko is working at Goldman-Sachs, Allyse Terrell is working at Capital One, and Michelle Wu will be joining Stanford for a PhD. Yan Wu, who spent time in the lab from the summer before his senior year in high school through his junior year at Princeton, also graduated and will be headed to UCSD for a PhD.

Our latest paper on enzymes that can "untie" lasso peptides has been accepted at JACS. Check it out here.

After completing his third rotation in the Link Lab, molecular biology grad student Joseph Koos has joined the group. Welcome Joe!

Edwin, Eugenia, Hannah, Jen, and Santiago graduated and are off to bigger and better things. Congrats to all!

Mikhail has been awarded a Dodds Fellowship, one of Princeton's honorific fellowships. Congrats Mikhail!

Jamie has been promoted to Associate Professor effective July 1.

Jamie is named a 2013 Sloan Research Fellow in Chemistry!

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New grad students Jack Lu and Frank Piscotta from Chemical and Biological Engineering and Chuhan Zong from Chemistry have joined the Link Lab. Welcome!

Our paper on lasso peptide discovery has been accepted at PNAS! Congrats to Mikhail, and click below to read the paper.

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Students from last year's Project SEED cohort are featured in a video on the ACS website. Much of this video was shot in the Link Lab! Check out the video at the link below and click on the outreach tab to learn more about Project SEED at Princeton.

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Our review article on lasso peptides has been accepted at Natural Product Reports. Click below to read the paper.

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Today's graduation ceremony had six Link Lab members getting their degrees. Diya, Jessica, and Siyan received their PhDs while John, Mehek, and Michelle received their BSEs.

Diya and Jessica both defended their PhD theses this week. Congratulations, Dr. Abdeljabbar and Dr. Pan!

Siyan successfully defended her thesis. Congratulations, Dr. Zhang! Siyan will be joining Merck and Co. in August.

Our paper on lasso peptide leader peptides is accepted at ChemComm. Congrats to Jakub, Jessica, and Mikhail!

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Jessica, Jakub, and Wai Ling's paper is accepted at ChemBioChem.

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Siyan and Angel's paper on BH3 peptide affinity maturation was accepted at ACS Synthetic Biology. Congrats!

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Diya's paper on fungal cellulase expression in E. coli was accepted at Biotechnology Letters.

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Jamie is named a DuPont Young Professor. We are grateful to DuPont for their support of our research.

Siyan's paper on Bcl-2 family interactions was accepted at Integrative Biology!

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Seniors Angel Long and Jakub Rajniak graduated. Angel will be heading to med school at Duke in the fall while Jakub will be purusing a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Stanford. Jakub was recognized at Class Day with the Hayes-Palmer Prize for overall academic excellence. You will both be missed, so please stay in touch!

Our paper on azidonorleucine was accepted at ChemBioChem. Congrats, Diya and TJ!

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Siyan's paper on PCR nanobeads is accepted at Nano Letters! Congratulations, Siyan!

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Jessica's paper on microcin J25 engineering is accepted at JACS! Here is a link to the paper.

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Mikhail passed his first proposition exam. Congrats, Mikhail!

First year grad student Alan Futran joins the group. Alan will be co-advised by Prof. Shvartsman. Welcome, Alan!.

Siyan's paper on nanoparticles was accepted at Polymer Chemistry.

Our collaborative paper with Profs. Panagiotopoulos and Debenedetti was accepted at Biophysical Journal. Congrats to Andy, Siyan, and Igor!

Jayne, Wai Ling, and Molly graduated. Congrats and please stay in touch in the future!

Wai Ling receives two awards for her senior thesis work on lasso peptides: the departmental Merck & Co. award and the SEAS-wide MacCracken Prize. Congrats, Wai Ling!

Current Link lab members and alumni gathered during reunions for the first annual Link Lab barbeque. It was a lot of fun to see everyone again!

Jamie receives the E. Lawrence Keyes, Jr/Emerson Electric Co. Faculty Advancement Award in Engineering

Prof. Link is awarded an NSF CAREER grant.

Wai Ling and Jessica have their work on the microcin J25 leader peptide published in JACS.

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Mikhail Maksimov joins the Link Lab. Welcome, Mikhail!

Jessica and Wai Ling’s paper on engineering the production of microcin J25 is accepted at Protein Expression and Purification.

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Diya, TJ, and Siyan’s paper on the incorporation of azidonorleucine into proteins in E. coli strains carrying a single genomic copy of an engineered MetRS is published at JACS. Congrats!

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