News

Congratulations to Jacob on winning the 2025 James Tolbert Shipley Prize, which recognizes excellent research carried out by a graduating medical student at HMS. Jacob was recognized for his work on mammalian doublet microtubules.

Sven's paper, which identifies how ubiquitinated proteins are retrieved from cilia, is now online as a preprint. 

Marija joins the lab for a rotation project, where she will be working alongside Haixia. 

We welcome Jeremy to the lab for his thesis project. Jeremy plans to study ciliary quality control mechanisms. 

The insides of motile cilia and flagella microtubules are coated in proteins - but are they all important for motility? Our latest study in Science addresses this question using trypanosomatids as model organisms.

Congratulations to former postdoc Travis Walton on being named a 2025 Sloan Research Fellow. 

https://sloan.org/fellowships/2025-Fellows

A bittersweet day for the Brown lab, as Jin Dai departs to start his own research group in Suzhou, China. We wish him all the best as he continues his studies of Chlamydomonas flagella. 

Our paper on structures of axonemes from different mammalian tissues is now online at Nature! This was another great collaboration with Rui Zhang and Tzviya Zeev-Ben-Mordehai. Highlights include structures of radial spoke 3 and identification of a sperm-specific axoneme-tethered TRiC chaperone. Jacob Anderson contributed the cryo-EM structure of a human fallopian doublet microtubule and our first foray into cryo-ET with a subtomogram average of the porcine fallopian doublet microtubule.

The Brown lab is seeking a highly motivated postdoctoral fellow to join our team. The successful candidate will study cilia-related mechanisms, with the specific project tailored to the candidate’s expertise and training needs. Projects generally fall into two areas: (1) elucidating fundamental mechanisms of ciliary motility and (2) understanding the establishment and regulation of ciliary signaling pathways.

The lab is delighted to welcome Tierra Buck, who joins for her PhD thesis project. Tierra will be studying different aspects of intraflagellar transport.

The lab welcomes two exceptional rotation students - Ammaar Saeed and Jean Beltram - to the lab.

We thank the NSF for funding our work with Eva Gluenz on understanding how axonemes allow parasites to move.

Today we say an emotional goodbye to Raymond, who has spent the last 3 years in the lab learning molecular biology and biochemistry. We wish him the best of luck as he pursues his dream of becoming a doctor. 

Congratulations to Travis Walton who has accepted a tenure-track position at the Van Andel Institute. We wish him all the best as he sets up his own lab to study neuronal microtubules. 

Our contribution to a study linking tubulin mutations to ciliopathic syndromes is published in Science.

Jin's work on the mastigoneme was published in Cell. Another fantastic collaboration with Rui Zhang, Susan Dutcher and Karl Lechtreck.

Travis and Matt's review on how cryo-EM can be used to resolve structures of ciliary microtubules has been published as the cover article for Acta Cryst D. 

Travis's structure of the axoneme from Chlamydomonas flagella made the cover of C&EN. Thanks to Laurel Oldach for her thoughtful article highlighting our research and featuring quotes from Travis and Josie. 

Nikita joins the lab as a rotation student to work on cryo-ET processing.

The lab would like to thank the Smith Family Foundation for their continued support of our research. Thank you!

The lab is delighted to be hosting three new rotation students - Serena Harden, Peter Ren, and Jeremy Bennett, who will be working on various cilia-related projects.

Following our successful collaboration on SPACA9, Johanna Höög (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) will be joining the lab as a sabbatical visitor to learn single-particle analysis cryo-EM. We look forward to hosting you for the next 6 months!

Congratulations to Jacob who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. Jacob now returns to medical school to finish his M.D., and will be greatly missed in the lab.

Sven was awarded a Sara Elizabeth O'Brien Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship! 

Congratulations to Matt on being awarded the 2023 Merck Company Foundation Fellowship. 

Two papers in Cell demonstrate the complexity of sperm doublet microtubules, including the first corresponding author paper from our previous postdoc Miao Gui. 

Travis and Miao's structures of axonemes are now online at Nature. This was a heroic multi-year effort enhanced by our wonderful collaborators Tom Burgoyne and Hannah Mitchison. The work is summarized in a Research Briefing. 

We're happy to contribute to the development of ModelAngelo - a transformative tool for automated model building and the identification of proteins in cryo-EM maps. Read the preprint here. 

The lab is delighted to welcome Luochen Liu for a Ph.D. rotation project. Luochen will be working on IFT and hopes to learn cryo-EM processing.

Thanks to the hard work of members of the Brown lab, past and present, Alan has been promoted to Associate Professor

Our paper on the structure and polymerization mechanism of a native IFT-A complex was published today in Cell. It was a pleasure to go back-to-back with Anthony Robert's paper on recombinant human IFT-A, and for the work to be previewed by Max Nachury. Congrats to all authors involved.

Today we said an emotional goodbye to the irreplaceable Miao Gui. Miao leaves to start his own lab in China (more details to follow). We wish him the best of luck and look forward to the amazing science that his team will produce in the future. 

Our latest work on human ciliary microtubules has been published in PNAS. We determined cryoEM structures of human respiratory doublet microtubules isolated from 2D organoids, and the singlet microtubules of the sperm endpiece revealing the presence of SPACA9 in both. This was a wonderful international collaboration with Tom Burgoyne (UCL, England) and Johanna Höög (University of Gothenburg, Sweden). 

Today the lab welcomes Sven Lange to the team. Sven joins from the MRC PPU in Dundee where he worked with Yogesh Kulathu on ubiquitin signaling.

Awesome to see our model of the Chlamy doublet microtubule on the cover of the Chlamydomonas sourcebook

Jacob and Jing's work features on the cover of this month's edition of Blood

The lab is delighted to welcome Matt Doran as a new postdoc. Matt joins from the Boston University School of Medicine, where he studied the mechanisms of cardiac muscle contraction and the structural causes of muscle disorders such as cardiomyopathies.

Congratulations to Jacob on the publication of his paper describing how VWF tubules form. This was a wonderful collaboration with Jing Li and Tim Springer. 

Today we welcome Nick Shaw to the lab for a 10-week summer placement. Nick is an undergraduate from the University of Cincinnati and is participating in the BCMP Summer Scholars program.

Congratulations to Jin who has been awarded a BCMP Christopher Walsh Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Our new collaborative study with Susan Dutcher and Rui Zhang reporting the structure of the Chlamydomonas central apparatus is now online at NSMB. Thanks to Elena Zehr and Antonina Roll-Mecak for their News and Views article. 

We're looking forward to having Raymond in the lab more often over the summer thanks to a Harvard College Research Program Fellowship.

Congratulations to Miao on his promotion to Instructor

Congratulations Jacob on being awarded an F30 training grant from the NIH/NHLBI!

Today was Sandeep's last day. He was the first postdoc to join the lab, so his leaving marks the end of an era. He goes on to join St. Jude's as a Staff Scientist. We wish him the best of luck!

Thanks to NSMB for highlighting our work on mammalian doublet microtubules.

Haixia's paper on the structure of CRL2^_Lrr1, an E3 ubiquitin ligase required for the termination of replication in eukaryotes is now online. This was a wonderful collaboration with Manal Zaher from Johannes Walter's lab.

Congratulations to Miao who was named our department's outstanding postdoc for 2021! 

Congratulations to Miao, Jacob, Josie, Shimi, and Sandeep for their contributions to our new paper in Cell. 

The lab thanks the Charles E.W. Grinnell Trust for Medical Research for funding our research.