March
- Family-style team dinner to celebrate Dr. Katerina Kiriakopulos and the promotion of Phil to Senior Scientist! Big fun with the best team!
March
- Congratulations Dr. Katerina Kiriakopulos, great defense! Your PhD project is a prime example of conserved lncRNA function and the multiple modes of lncRNA actions!
February
Congratulations, Dr. Sameen Ahmed! First PhD student of the lab is leaving after a successful defense and a great project about how tRNA-overlapping lncRNAs (tROLs) regulate genes in trans. All the best, Sameen!
December
Congrats to your MSc thesis and all the great results about a novel lncRNA involved in cardiovascular biology, Jiajie! We wish you all the best!
November
We developed a machine learning-empowered pipeline, termed Signature, to uncover inter-chromosomal contacts in Hi-C datasets. Great interdisciplinary team’s effort! Special thanks to Drs. Anja Weise, Samin Aref, Eric Joyce, and Thomas Liehr. More on disease genome topology to come!
July
Just went for team lunch and packed an entire elevator! A warm welcome to the new team members Yuxi, Claire, and Andeep!April
In the work with Dr. Karim Mekhail’s lab, we describe a novel DNA repair mechanism!December
Our MPRA protocol for performing high-throughput functional genomics is out. Thanks Chiara and John for teaming up.October
Katerina presents her project at the EMBL ‘The non-coding genome’ conference in Heidelberg (Germany) and wins a poster prize! Congratulations!September
First Master graduation of a Maass Lab team member! Congrats to Mariam Attia, you pursued a successful project and performed great during the defense.May
Another great project with long-term collaborator Dr. Enno Klussmann from the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine Berlin is out in Kidney International. Mutant phosphodiesterase 3A protects the kidney from hypertension-induced damage. More to come!May
The first Maass Lab paper is out in Cell Genomics: Systematic characterization of regulatory variants of blood pressure genes. Congrats to the entire team and all co-workers, especially Winona Oliveros from Dr. Marta Melé’s lab in Barcelona.May
The first off-site and overnight GGB retreat at Niagara-on-the-lake is a big success! Invited speakers: Drs. Bruce Beutler and Len Pennacchio!February
Snowing outside, but the dry lab is heating up SickKids high performance computing cluster with massive parallel computing. Stay tuned on this massive computer science project.December
Closing another great year with a big family dinner with the entire team – and welcoming Jiajie Ma from UBC as MSc candidate!December
Collaborative efforts are out in Circulation to better understand how PDE3A mutations causing Mendelian hypertension protect from hypertension-induced cardiac damage.October
July
The Maass Lab is almost 4 years old! What a great team that is constantly growing! Good luck for Daniella in industry, and for Brandon in grad school, and thanks for contributing great science to our mutual endeavors to assign function to the non-coding genome.July
Big thanks for the generous funding by the Grant-in-Aid program of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. We will determine functional elements of the non-coding genome that impact cardiovascular biology and essential hypertension.May
Congrats to Jared for being awarded a three-year NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship (PGS Doctoral)! Big thanks to Canada’s NSERC program!March
The project with Mital, Scherer, Ellis, Melé labs and many more is out in NPJ Genomic Medicine: ‘Identification of non-coding variants in childhood cardiomyopathy’
March
After craving for best Bibimbab in town, finally after two years we had team lunch to welcome Tara Phillips and Jordan Chalmers, starting as Technologists!March
Great collaboration with Drs. Anne-Claude Gingras and Ben Blencowe labs on nuclear domain-associated transcripts, out in Molecular Cell.March
Congrats to Daniella for being awarded a Ontario Genomics-CANSSI Ontario Postdoctoral Fellowship in Genome Data Science, and to Milad for a postdoctoral Restracomp fellowship from SickKids! Great computational biology to come from the Maass Lab.
December
Lucky us! We had an extremely tasty pre-Omicron Christmas dinner! Merry X-mas to a wonderful team. More to come in 2022!
November
August
Great distraction, leisure, and fun with the entire lab, AND HAPPY 3rd BIRTHDAY MAASS LAB!
July
3D Socializing with the BIG NEW TEAM! What a nice FRIDAY AFTERNOON!June
After 16 months, our 1st in-person lab meeting in the park! No excuse for bad internet connection! ☺May
Another successful virtual reclassification exam! Katerina will obtain her PhD by determining the molecular mechanism of a functional lncRNA. Congrats!March
Successful team expansions can be accomplished during the pandemic! A big welcome for postdoctoral fellows Drs. Daniella Lato and Milad Mokhtaridoost, MSc candidate Mariam Attia, and PhD candidate Jared Browning. More on socially distanced meet & greet events soon!September
We received the first CIHR grant and I am humbled by the Maude Menten New Investigator Price in Genetics. Thanks for the support of our research program and for constructive reviewer comments. Great that the CIHR Spring Competition was reinstated.
September
Team contact in 3D by a ‘socially distanced’ BBQ party. A lot to talk about and to celebrate. The lab is already 2 years old!
July
We are back in the lab with the best restart phase 1b team ever! 25 % occupancy, but more to come – stay tuned!
June
Just received very good news about being awarded our first NSERC Discovery Grant! This is great, thanks very much. We acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).May
Congrats! Sameen successfully passed the reclassification exam and is the first PhD student in the Maass Lab! Great science to come!
April
We are all safe and the team is up in the virtual space. We are busy with discussing the computational aspects of our projects and journal clubs, as well as practicing presentations for seminars and talks. We will be back in the lab soon!
January
Happy New Year with great news. Congrats on Sergio’s postdoc paper from Mount Sinai, NYC. A big welcome to our new grad students Katerina Kiriakopulos and Matthew Stocek, and Brandon McMurray is back for a research internship.
October
Great times with rotation students Katerina Kiriakopulos and Matthew Stocek and big welcome for our postdoc Dr. Sergio Espeso-Gil
September
Happy 1st Birthday Maass Lab – what an adventurous and exciting ride with great people in and around the lab!
August
Thanks to the Canada Foundation for Innovation for the generous support to do live-cell imaging and to store big amounts of data.
July
Much bigger than the petri dish tower for MPRAs is only Sameen’s 5 years Restracomp fellowship award! Many congrats and thanks to the SicKKids Research Training Centre.
June
Philipp was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Noncoding Disease Mechanisms!May
New funding from NFRF for “Decoding RNA genes and chromatin biology in disease”. Many thanks for supporting our research!April
Developmental and Stem Cell Biology Retreat 2019, Lake Simcoe, OntarioMarch
Cover story Genome Research (Mattioli et al.) with Marta Melé (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) and with members of the Rinn Laboratory (Harvard University/University of Colorado Boulder) on the fundamental properties of long non-coding RNAs vs. mRNA promoters: “High-throughput functional analysis of lncRNA core promoters elucidates rules governing tissue specificity”
Keystone meeting in Banff, Alberta: 3D Genome, Gene Regulation and Disease
February
First lab photo with our first grad student Sameen Ahmed!November
The Airyscan Fast imaging system arrived and CRISPR live-cell imaging (CLING) works in Canada too!
Lab Manager Kate Delfosse started and cloned the first constructs. A small step for mankind, a giant step for the Maass Laboratory!
September
Let us establish a lab! Unpacking, organizing, optimizing…