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On 18th October I headed to Portugal to attend the III international PhasAGE conference in Porto. The city was lovely, I had hoped to get a bit of autumn sunshine but unfortunately it wasn’t to be – it was horizontal rain almost the entire week. The science made up for it though, it was fascinating to learn about more of the biology that is controlled by the proteins that we study inside the mass spectrometer.

I was pleased to make new friends, and also to catch up with Sheena Radford, who I hadn’t seen since I was an undergraduate student in her group over 10 years ago. I particularly enjoyed learning about functional amyloid fibrils from Salvador Ventrura (IBB, Barcelona), hearing about ataxin-3 from Sandra Ribeiro (IS3, Porto) and I loved learning about a bacterial drug discovery platform for protein misfolding diseases from Georgios Skretas (Biomedical Sciences Research Center “Alexander Fleming”, Greece).

I gave a presentation on the use of ion mobility mass spectrometry to study liquid liquid phase separation of UBQLN2. You can read about here – https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacs.3c00756

I also spoke about our recent work on deciphering the conformations of the Androgen Receptor N-terminal domain, which you can read more about here – https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/652d4b2bbda59ceb9ab35fce

I stayed in Porto over the weekend and went for a long run in the hills on Saturday, by which time the rain had stopped and the views were lovely.

Many thanks to Sandra and the rest of the organisation team for putting on a great conference.

No matter when you’re reading this, I still won’t have shut up about the food and the pastries in Porto.

Bex