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Hans Pfalzgraf

@scihans.bsky.social

1.1K followers 374 following 52 posts

Research Scientist at ProImmune. Biochemistry to help make Ankyron® protein binders. Former crystallographer. I love #SciComm, #Sustainability, #Climbing and #EDM. Views are my own. He/Him.

Posts Replies Media

Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

That's one cursed colour scheme for anyone who has learned a little chemistry 😂

Adenosine molecule represented as balls and sticks with carbon in red, oxygen in blue and nitrogen in green 🤢

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

My protein crystals getting imaged by the Formulatrix Rock Imager. I think it's pretty awesome! 🥰 And convenient to be able to check the images from my desk, including time points to check growth. Beats sitting at a microscope where you can't drink tea! ☕ #Crystallography #ResearchComplexAtHarwell

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

They resealed the electron storage ring of the synchrotron @diamondlightsource.bsky.social during shutdown to get it ready for more experiments!

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

This week I harvested about 450 beautiful protein crystals, more than in my 7 previous years of crystallography! These are crystals of a Covid target in which I soaked promising drug fragments to see what binds and how.

Smiling Hans in a lab coat sitting with a crystal-harvesting wand in front of a Crystal Shifter robot with a microscope and a foam bucket of liquid nitrogen.

Two beautiful protein crystals shaped like squished pyramids seen in their drop using a light microscope.

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I started a new job at @diamondlightsource.bsky.social! A 2nd protein crystallography postdoc, this time for antiviral drug discovery 🤩 It's only funded until October this year, but I'm sure I'll find something else after that 😁

A smiling Hans with a staff lanyard, standing inside the experimental hall of Diamond Light Source, the UK national synchrotron. There are the roofs of a couple beamlines and a yellow crane at the back. The curved wall has zone 4 indicated in red.

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

I'm particularly interested in how these properties in cytochromes P460 are affected by the unusual heme-protein crosslinking. This makes them green, distorts the heme and allows them to oxidise the iron-bound NH2OH to N2O, a greenhouse gas. This is basically what makes them #P460 instead of #P450!

A pretty protein structure made mostly of beta-sheets. There are two hemes, one per monomer. In P460, the heme is linked to a lysine residue and can do hydroxylamine oxidation. In one c prime beta, the heme has peroxidase-like activity. In another,it does gas binding.

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Hello, can I be added? I'm a biochemist currently making cool protein structures. Fresh pre-print on the discovery a new heme modification: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Me: orcid.org/0000-0003-05... More papers to come! And I do good SciComm 😁

Line-angle formula of a heme c with a double crosslink to a lysine residue. The modification compared to a single N-C crosslink are highlighted in red: a double bond is added between the carbons CD and CE of the lysine. The double bond of pyrrole ring D has shifted away from the new C-C crosslink to become exocyclic.

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Hello new followers! 👋 I'm a structural biologist 🧶🧬 currently having fun with unusual kinds of protein crystallography 💎 at Diamond Light Source. 😀 But my 3 years are almost over... 😢 So I'm looking for a lab-based biochemistry job 🧪 in the Oxford area. If you have any leads, please get in touch! 😁

Smiley Hans in the lab wearing proper PPE. Using a multichannel pipette to dispense buffers into a crystallisation plate based on electronic lab notes on a tablet.

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

I do like the phase biased cat! It helps understand why we have to do iterative building and beware of what looks suspiciously like the starting model. www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/four...

A noisy red silhouette of a cat with a half-faded tail. This happens when you take the phases of a tail-less cat and the Fourier magnitudes of a cat with tail.

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Iris in CCP4i2 is very useful to find amino acid residues that are particularly more mobile at room temperature than in cryogenic conditions! #protein #crystallography 🧪 @glycojones.bsky.social I assume that's not the use you had in mind when leading its development? 😁 🧶🧬

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Making this green protein has been pretty great 🧪 Easy to find it and estimate concentration! But can you guess WHY it's green? 😋 🧶🧬

A few small tubes with dark green liquid, arranged in a half-circle

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Blink and you might miss it moving! The Scorpion is my current favourite instrument. It can make my 96 conditions (2D gradient of concentrations) in half an hour. And look SUPER COOL doing it! 😆 #crystallography 🧪

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Hans Pfalzgraf @scihans.bsky.social · 19/12/2023

I inherited some dissolved metals from my colleague Peter Smyth and I think they're very pretty 🤩 We use them for long cultures of bacteria, so they don't run out of metal ions when making our favourite proteins 😊

Rack of labelled tubes containing red (CoCl2), blue (CuSO4), green (NiCl2), orange (FeCl3) and colourless solutions (McCl2 and ZnSO4)

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