All right. Well, I would like to begin by thanking the organizers for inviting me here. And this has been a really neat experience because I am solidly on the biochemistry side. And so I don't think a lot or hear a lot about physics. And I think one of the best things that I call a good meeting is when you learn something. And I can clearly say I'm learning a whole lot here. And so I want to start with just, oh, that's not what I was supposed to show. That's my kids. That's what they do for fun. See, I told you my computer is having a little trouble. So while we're getting this sorted out, this is something that I've kind of been thinking about through these talks is, okay, in physics, people are asking, seem very straightforward questions. If we have a plane, well, then what happens if we deform that plane? You know, so for example, such as folding a piece of paper. And the way we're going to think about this, though, actually is fairly complex. You know, we may be using some sort of equations that look something one minus feet. For an equation I saw yesterday and I said, what the heck is that? But what the goal is is to, you know, have a very fundamental question. Think about this in a sophisticated way, but really, you know, get to, I think, back to something very straightforward, right? Where we can really say, hey, we understand this system. Now, in biochemistry, what we do is we're thinking about something a little bit more complicated. So for example, we may be saying, we've got a cell. Here is our little virus particle. It goes in and then out comes our little virus particle times 1000, right? This is the biochemistry, what they're thinking about. And how are we going to do this? We're just going to watch, essentially, right? We're going to watch and say, hey, what can we learn? And then the thing is, is we don't get out something really simple. What we may get out is a couple of different plots.  We get out some pretty pictures of cells with viruses in them. And we have to really infer what's going on by essentially, you know, bringing all of this information together. Okay? So now what I want to try to do today with my talk is take the best of all the worlds, at least from my little perspective, which would be, okay, let's take the simple idea, combine it with just watching, and then come up with a nice little answer. So let's see if we can do that. It's going slow. Okay, so how are we going to do this? So here's what we'll call an energy landscape. And let's say we start with some protein subunits. And we've talked about this a lot, this meeting. And one of our really things that we're thinking about is, well, how do we take individual protein subunits? And then how do we actually make those into a virus? And we've thought about this in the context that there is some sort of delta G involved here, and that it's actually a negative delta G because this is a favorable process. This happens, right? We know that. And then viruses have an interesting problem. This can't be their global minimum state, right? Because if it was, that's the end of the virus, right? We have to have infection. So what the virus has to do is it has to get over here where we had our little, right? We know we've got some nucleic acids packed over there. And we have to get over here to a state where either we still have the intact capsid, but somehow our nucleic acids have got out. Or maybe our capsid has actually fallen apart and we're back to our triangles, right? So what we can see from this is essentially this means that a virus really has a thermodynamic balancing act that it has to go through, right? It has to be in a situation where inside of a cell it can essentially assemble, and this has to be a favorable process. And then essentially in a very similar environment, back in a cell, it has to then have a favorable process where it falls apart. So how does it occur? And so this is kind of what I want to bring up are some ways, the experiments that we've been doing looking at the stability and dynamics of proteins and virus particles. And so my talk, what I want to do is I want to start and focus on, let's just look at the proteins and think about these proteins as what are really the functional attributes of the proteins that are going to help them assemble into a particle. And so I'm going to do this by showing you some data from hepatitis B virus, which you've heard in a number of talks already. And then what I want to do is look at this process of how does the virus actually go through this process of assembly and maturation to where you have an infectious particle here. And so to look at this, I'm actually going to look at P22, so bacteriophage, which has the details have been worked out really nicely of looking at this. And then I want to finish up with actually looking at a whole bunch of different viruses. A library of virus particles where we can start to think about, well, what really is the difference here? What is this delta G? And I think really importantly, what is this activation energy? Because there's got to be a hill here because these particles have to be stable. They have to be able to get from the host cell to a new cell to infect. So there has to be some sort of barrier here, but can we think about that barrier and what might it look like? Okay, so I'll start with talking about hepatitis B virus. And so the reason we picked hepatitis B virus for this work is because essentially we can study the disassembled proteins, the capsid proteins, which are dimeric under the exact same solution conditions that we can study the assembled particle. And so that's really one of these unique systems. So Tully mentioned she could do this this morning also. And so this allows us to really understand what are the inherent properties of the capsid protein and what are the emergent properties of the virus particle. And so today I'm going to focus on the capsid protein. And so this is a well-studied system, the way HBV assembles from essentially a dimeric set of the capsid proteins. They fold into a dimer. And then there's been a lot of work particularly by Adam Slotnik and his group showing you that this is a, it appears to be an allosterically regulated process. So things like ionic strength, heat and divalent cations all will essentially drive assembly. And so some of the work that we've done in the past is essentially looking at well what could potentially this activated or assembly competence state look like and we've been able to show that it's more protected or more folded than what appears to be the assembly incompetent form. And so this gives us this kind of little model where we have some sort of activators that drive nucleation of a folded state leading to assembly of the particle. Now there's a really interesting mutant of hepatitis B capsid protein. And so a single immune acid mutation, a tyrosine at position 132 to an alanine essentially leads to an assembly inactive dimer. So this dimer, you can mix it together under any conditions you want and it will not assemble into capsids. And so in this case we're looking at the, you can see a nice view of this very helical dimeric assembly unit. Now Adam's Latinx group was actually able to determine the structure of this dimer in solution. It actually crystallized as a trimer of dimers. And so one of the first things they noticed is there were very subtle changes in the structure from the wild type protein to this Y132A mutant. As you might imagine it's a single mutation and the mutation is actually out on this little turn here. This is the C-terminus and this is the part that ends up inside the capsid in the assembled virus. And so the mutation is way out here. One of the biggest conformational changes in this is actually in this spike domain. You can see this helix actually gets bent. So that right there tells us something interesting about this protein. It tells us that you make a mutation out here. The big change is in the spike way over here. And this fits the functionality that this protein is really functionally designed and it's an allosteric protein. So things that happen at a far really propagate through the system. So if you take this mutant form of the protein and you run it through sides of the exclusion chromatography what you see is Y132A looks bigger than the wild type protein. And we believe that's because those C-termoral arms near the mutation the wings are kind of flapping. And so it has a bigger hydrodynamic radius than the wild type protein. So now what if we probe it biophysically a little bit? So if we do a thermal denaturation experiment shown here on the top what we see is that Y132A actually is less stable by about 12 degrees than the wild type protein. So again this is kind of interesting because that mutation was way out on the ends. You wouldn't think that would really have a direct impact on the hydrophobic core of this protein which is going to really be important for the stability yet it clearly does. Well how about chemical denaturation? So if we use urea what we see is that Y132A also denatures at almost a full molar unit less of urea than the wild type protein. So it's both thermal and chemical stability is lower. So now what about thinking about the dynamic properties? So one of the ways we look at the dynamic properties of a protein is using hydrogen deuterium exchange mass spectrometry. This is just a quick overview. So if we take our protein and it's going to be all the side chains and the protein backbone will be bound with hydrogens. If we drop that into D2O and allow it to sit for a while then hydrogens that essentially are exposed on the surface or are not involved in a stable hydrogen bond are going to exchange with the water. So these are your amide protons. These are your side chain protons. So then if we quench that then we have an intact protein that has some hydrogens and some deuterium. So we can either look at the intact protein using mass spec or we can digest it with an enzyme cut it up into pieces and look at the pieces and localize exactly where that exchange is occurring. So if we do this with our dimeric hepatitis B capsid protein what we actually see is that Y132A has less exchange. So what we're looking at here is over time we're monitoring the increase in deuterium uptake in these proteins and we can see that actually the mutant, I mean I'm sorry I'm pointing at the wild type CP149 has more exchange the mutant has less exchange. So this tells us the mutant actually seems to have a more stable hydrogen bonding network than the wild type protein yet we just saw that under conditions of heat and chemical stress it actually comes apart more easily. So it seems to be a little difference here depending on how you probe this system. Well that was a global look. So what if we look at the individual peptides. So I'm just showing you what the data actually looks like so we cut the protein into little peptides and then if we monitor over time so here is time zero you're this is a single peptide and we're looking at the C13 isotope ratio. As we add deuterium we shift to higher M over Z values mass to charge values as we pick up deuterium and so essentially we get an uptake curve. So we can look at these uptake curves and if we know which peptide we have we can essentially map those uptakes and so this is just showing you each of the this is the our CP149 protein and these are all the peptides that we have to do this mapping and so by combining all of this data the uptake curves from each of those we essentially can get near single amino acid resolution as far as our exchange and this is just showing you all of the peptides we have to go through this one little helix and what you can see is that depending on the you know this specific peptide we can see very different levels of exchange and so this allows us then to pinpoint exactly where that exchange is happening. So now we can do this between our wild type and mutant protein and we can say okay we know that overall the Y132a appeared more stable but where is it more stable or you know is it everywhere or is it just in places and so here's our dimer again so the little stars show you where the mutation is this is where that conversion from tyrosine to alanine is well we can see blue here so blue means increased exchange in the mutant so less stable hydrogen bonding so this region the end is less stable just as we expected those wings are kind of flapping that's what our size exclusion data told us but if we look kind of into the hydrophobic core of this protein it's actually more stable and then in the spike region we see one of the helixes in each of the dimers and each of the monomers actually shows significantly increased exchange and so this is really interesting because again we make a mutation here and what we see is essentially we see an effect here but we see bigger effects essentially distal from that mutation this protein is really allosterically tuned and being regulated by this and so I think this really serves to show us kind of how complicated this system is now that data I showed you was at one time point that was one hour but we have a whole trajectory of time points so if we start thinking about well let's look at different time points because those tell us about events that happen quickly or slowly which can tell us about dynamics and stability so this plot is a little complicated but what we're looking at is essentially our amino acid sequence and we're looking at our percent change of exchange so whether there's more solvent accessibility in the wild type or more solvent accessibility in the mutant and then we're looking at a half minute two minute ten minute and sixty and so what we can see is that the wild type actually is much more dynamic in the early time points but as time goes along they get closer together except for certain regions so here's that spike region which we saw in the wild type in the mutant was really dynamic and then here's that C-terminal region where again it becomes more dynamic whereas the hydrophobic core of the protein is less dynamic and so if we think of exchange as just occurring as a two state model then we can use this information to essentially get out some proxy free energy information but what we're really looking at is our delta delta G so our change in the change in free energy for these mutations and so we can look at this on the fast time scale and see that our mutant rather has lower free energy but when we get closer to sixty minutes what we're seeing is a little bit different situation with this change in the change in free energy where our wild type protein actually now has regions that have favorable delta G energies and then if we just look overall we see that the Y132A does have more favorable delta delta Gs and we knew this because our original overall data told us this was more stable but our dynamics data says this is more stable but as you remember our chemical and thermal denaturation said it was not more stable that that form of the protein actually denatured more easily so Y132A seems to have a globally stabilized hydrogen bonding network and the impact of this mutation seems to stabilize the hydrophobic core while increasing dynamics in other regions of the protein so I mean this sets us up to I think understand that this is not a simple process going from unassembled to assembled proteins and lots of things regulate this but this is also critical because these same sort of allosteric regulators are involved with taking the virus from here to allowing us to get to here okay so now I want to shift to from looking at the individual subunits but how do we get to a particle that's an infectious system and so I want to look at we're going to use P22 so this is a bacteria phase and we've heard about this system already so this is a T7 bacteria phase and this is a very nice structure from Gabe Lander and this is a really good model for understanding the maturation process and a lot of work has been done by John King, Peter Privilege, Trevor Douglas and Carol Teschke on looking at this system during maturation it's also used for nanomaterials as well okay so just a quick little background of P22 assembly so this virus assembles from a set of coat proteins it has a portal protein that goes in so the part that Peter was just talking about actually is the ejection portal but this is involved with packaging the DNA as well and it has a scaffold protein so then the scaffold protein gets ejected once the DNA starts getting pumped into this system and then there's an expansion that occurs and you go from a spherical particle, a procapsid to an icosahedral capsid our hypothesis when entering this project we think that this particle maturation and adoption of icosahedral symmetry are really going to increase the stability of these particles and essentially decrease protein dynamics and this maturation process proceeds through a series of potentially local energy minima or that each of these steps from procapsid to capsid essentially could be thought of as a metastable confirmation and so of course we're going to do this in vitro to keep with our idea we got to keep things simple there and so you can take a procapsid so this is an empty procapsid and you can treat it with half molar guanidine HCl for example and you can remove the scaffold protein because this particle will not assemble without the scaffold alternatively and then it's possible to take the empty shell and move to our expanded shell which has the icosahedral structure or you can go directly from the procapsid through heating and get your expanded shell and if you heat even further from your expanded shell you get this interesting particle that essentially has blown out the pentamers you get what's called the wiffle ball form of this particle and so a lot of nanomaterials work has been done with this wiffle ball form where you've lost your pentamers and so here's a little diagram showing you the procapsid empty shell expanded shell and wiffle ball and so this will be on all the slides so you can kind of yes well in vitro we can do this with heat heat also also from here and from here so this is what's really cool and I'll show you on the next slide that's a great point because it really tells us that each of these are thermodynamically distinct and independent and you can actually move through them all together so the questions we're going to ask are you on the properties we want to look at are stability and conformational flexibility at each of these different forms and so the first technique we're going to use is differential scanning fluorimetry and so essentially this is a really straightforward technique where we take a small fluorescent die molecule that's quenched in polar environments if it binds to a non-polar environment such as a pocket and a protein as it's unfolding your fluorescence intensity increases and what's really cool about this is you can actually do this in a qPCR machine so you can run these in multiplex so you can do 100 samples at once and it takes about 3 microliters per reaction so it's a great way to do a lot of screening experiments and so if we look at our different forms of p22 using this DSF technique let's start here at the top where we're looking at procapsid so as we increase temperature we're looking at fluorescence intensity and we've just stacked these plots we see a big broad transition then as we get closer to 80 degrees we see a second transition and then at just over 90 degrees we see a third transition for procapsid now if we take particles that are purified that we've already gone through the first step we've already removed the scaffolding protein all of a sudden we lose that first transition we see the second and the third and they're just the same as in the procapsid form so the second and third transitions haven't changed if we go to the expanded form so our icosahedral version we don't see that first transition we still see the second and third transitions now if we go to the wiffle ball we've lost the pentamers we take purified wiffle ball we now don't have the first or the second transition we only have our third transition so then this allows us to essentially assign what are those transitions we're looking at and to put them into the scheme and so transition one then is really that's associated with the release of our scaffold essentially we're watching the scaffold come out and this is a really broad event as you can see transition two is pentamer release and transition three essentially this is when our virus completely deforms so then this table just reconfirms this what this really tells us is we have big differences in the thermal stability of each of these forms of the particle as we move through this maturation at least through the expanded shell we see increasing TMs and the wiffle ball actually has the highest TM that kind of suggests that when you pop out those pentamers you essentially improve your thermal stability with that which fits with some of what we've heard about the pentamers being defects in these particles so now let's look at that was at pH 7 well what's the effect of pH and we can just look really quickly at this because if we concentrate ignore the black trace so this is procapsid at pH 4 to 9 essentially there's no change pH has no effect as long as it's between 4 to 9 if you drop it down to pH 2.8 you see that the transition start to change so very low pH is affect this empty shell we see the same thing pH 4 to 9 has no change and the same with the other form so really this particle is independent of pH why did we do this experiment? well for those of you who study viruses in cells we know that with eukaryotic systems a lot of viruses are very pH sensitive because they enter the cell through endocytosis this is a bacteria phase it doesn't do that right it doesn't have that process it injects its nucleic acid into the cell but we needed to check that so here's our conclusions from thermal stability really pH independent and each we have these very distinct transitions between each form what about chemical stability so now let's look at guanidinium hydrochloride and so in each of these plots we're looking at so this is at a half molar guanidinium hydrochloride and we're looking at procapsid and we see essentially the procapsid trace we now see transition 2 and 3 have changed so even at a half molar guanidinium hydrochloride procapsid has changed ES has also changed but the expanded shell and the wiffle ball have not so the expanded shell and the wiffle ball are more stable to chemical denaturation so once we've made this transition from a procapsid a spherical structure to adopting our icosahedral geometries the capsid is more stable and we just do this with increasing concentrations just to show you so at one molar our wiffle ball is still fine but now our expanded capsid is starting to show a little change and the procapsid and the empty shell are definitely changing so this again helps us look at the stability of these and how the pronounced destabilization of the spherical forms and less of the expanded and the wiffle ball now this process of maturation we wanted to understand if the role of protein folding how are there changes in secondary structure so we use circular dichroism which allows us to look for changes in secondary structure and really the story is we can detect no changes in secondary structure so essentially this is our heating isotherms of procapsid, empty shell expanded and wiffle ball and what you can see is from 20 to 85 degrees essentially are all right here we see no change in our CD signal but essentially when we get to 90, 95 all of these spectra change so what that tells us essentially is that remember that's our transition where our wiffle ball thermally denatures so essentially there's no change up until you get to the wiffle ball this thing denatures and just precipitates so we completely lose our CD signal so secondary structural changes and folding is not really involved in this process okay structural rigidity how am I doing on time okay so five minutes to finish we can have questions structural rigidity well we're going to look at AFM and we've had some nice introductions to AFM so I will skip over that but I just want to show you that actually this is work that we did in collaboration with Pedro and one of his talented students Aida where we did imaging they imaged the different forms and actually then we did indentation experiments but the first was just to look at the particle height just to confirm that the AFM was telling us what we expected and it was we see the expanded shell being tallest and the wiffle ball appears lower because it's missing these pentamers so on average it's going to get a little bit lower on the mica but they did force indentation curves as we heard Pedro describe the other day in vooder that where we're looking essentially at our displacement and force and then we can use those to essentially determine spring constants for these particles and see that the expanded and the wiffle ball have a much higher spring constant so these are much essentially more rigid particles if we look at critical strain so essentially what sort of deformation can these particles withstand what we see is that actually the expanded shell is the most brittle and the wiffle ball now is actually appears to be less brittle that once we lost those pentamers the wiffle ball actually becomes a little bit more deformable before it fails the last technique I'm going to bring in is our quartz crystal micro balance so this is essentially a technique where it allows us to essentially absorb a material on a surface and we can measure the amount of material but we can also essentially so this is a vibrating quartz crystal we're using the piezoelectric effect and we turn off the potential and we essentially measure how fast it decays so very rigid material are very coupled to the crystal and so they dissipate very slowly whereas a soft material is uncoupled and so you see a really larger dissipation and so we can look at this f and d ratio and say something about the rigidity of a material and so when we essentially bind our virus to our quartz crystal we see a decrease in frequency this tells us about the mass we're depositing and then we see an increase in dissipation which tells us about the essentially something about the rigidity or the modulus of our material and so if we do these measurements we see that from PC to ES there's not really a change but once we get to our expanded shell and wiffle ball there is an increase in rigidity in these particles and we see that the wiffle ball now appears to be more rigid when we're looking at this global method compared with AFM when we were looking at more of a point source on this ok and so we've done HD exchange on these and what we can essentially see is our intact protein HD exchange shows that we get less exchange as these particles maturation occurs ok and that now one other quick analysis is we wanted to look at one of the structural changes involved and so it turns out there are a number of cryoem structures of the p22 capsid looking at procapsid and expanded shell in one case from christen parent's lab and procapsid and wiffle ball from wachu's lab and so we use these to essentially see if we could look at the difference in the solvent excluded surface area in each of these cases to get an idea of how much more protein-protein interaction there potentially is in these cases and what we really were able to see to make a complicated story is that we see a lot of increase in interaction at the quasi interfaces so these interfaces that are specific to the formation of an icosahedron are important for that's where we're seeing a lot more protein-protein interactions with this and overall there was a small overall increase in the effective core and so then you know really putting all of these different techniques together and trying to say well what do we learn well one maturation involves the formation of these quasi equivalent sub unit interactions scaffolding protein interestingly it does not impact the chemical or thermal stability of these particles or the AFM whether scaffold protein is there or not we can't tell by these techniques which I find very interesting with that icosahedral interactions resulted in the increased stability of EX and wiffle ball and the loss of these penton leads to a less brittle and more chemically stable particle and so then this is just our final trying to put this all together back to where I started our talk into an energy landscape and thinking about we have these distinct phases of maturation or forms of the particle and each of these you know preliminary are a metastable state down to our wiffle ball and remember this really isn't biologically important but also we can start to think about something about the width of these wells which is partially based on how dynamic or the rigidity of these particles something that's less rigid is going to have more conformational freedoms you're going to get a wider essentially energy well unless we've tried to show is EX which is very rigid we have a narrow energy well whereas wiffle ball and ES are more dynamic and so they have essentially more conformational freedom and what we don't know about is yet is really how high are these activation barriers between these different metastable states so and I'll just end here with this is we've looked at a whole library of particles using this quartz crystal micro balance technique and what we're looking at here is our rigidity our frequency dissipation ratio we're seeing our different T numbers of all the particles that we've looked at and how this relates to on this axis we're looking at diameter and so this is one of these giant algal viruses shown here pbcv1 and so what we can see essentially is if we graph this and well it's not our not a perfect fit we're seeing at least in this one measure of global stability or of these particles or rigidity we're seeing you know some sort of semi exponential fit here to try to tie it all back together to getting the simple answer and so with that I'd like to thank people in my group who help with this project Naveed, Ravi, Vomsi who you heard earlier from please a group and Angela have done most of this work my collaborators specifically Adam, Trevor, Pedro and Mavis and oh there's Ravi and with that I would be happy to take questions


Santa knows where to find all the best and hottest smartphones just in time to make this Christmas better and bigger than ever. Better service, bigger savings, that's today's Appalachian Wireless. In July, EKB News brought you the story of an attempted grave robbery in Martin County. The grave that was disturbed was that of Emily Howard and the incident left family members hurt and confused.  I mean, why? It's hard enough to go through a funeral, but 15 years later it has somebody come and dig your mother up, that's despicable, absolutely despicable. Within just a few days, the Martin County Sheriff's Department arrested 35-year-old Jennifer Luster and 33-year-old James Howard both of Inez and charged them with violating graves. Today, both Luster and Howard appeared in Martin County Circuit Court for sentencing. James Howard was sentenced to serve one year in jail and Jennifer Luster was also sentenced to serve one year in jail, but that sentence was probated for three years. Mr. Howard was actually the individual that basically made the decision to do this, again engaged in doing this, did the actual physical activities involved in the crime. Ms. Luster was charged as a complicitor to Mr. Howard and her husband, TJ Luster. She in fact was just the driver and provided, basically provided the material aid and driving them to the location. She was not involved in any way in the desecration of the graves. Howard was credited with time served and looks to serve out his sentence in March. Coming from Inez, I'm Shawn Allen for EKB News.


The present study found that the validity of diagnoses and procedure records in the Japanese diagnosis procedure combination, DPC, data and laboratory test results in the newly introduced standardized structured medical record information exchange, SSMIX, data was high. This suggests that these data sources can be used in future studies. This article was authored by Hayato Yamana.


What's up guys? Michael Rajaspi is doing a recap for 2023 Panini Immaculate Baseball 2 Box Break Random Team Number 4. This was done auction style on Fanatic Slide. Here is the list and here is the recap. Starting off with a Mikabell Prospect Patch Auto Redemption. Then we had a Zach Veen Glove Patch and Autograph to 49. And also for the Rockies, freaking great break for them. Drew Romo Fielding Glove Embroidered Rawlings Patch 1 of 1. We had a Pete Rose Patch Auto to 25. Tori Hunter Patch Auto to 25. Joe Cronin Frank Viola. Tyler Sodastrom Laundry Tag. These are taped together on accident I think. Laundry Tag 1 of 1 Patch Warming Burnabell Redemption. Colm Couser Patch Auto. Brennan Fat to 99 and then a Bob 11 Relic to 15. That does it for the recap. Thank you to everyone who got into the break. Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye guys.


It's hip hop to celebrate Harmony Day, the indigenous hip hop project the first of many talented and culturally diverse musicians and dancers to entertain crowds at the Harmony Day Festival in Sydney. The festival at the Belmore Sports Ground is one of three and a half thousand events happening across Australia to celebrate Harmony Day on March 21. The centre of celebrations, a citizenship ceremony in which 10 people from as many different nations officially became Australians. It's remarkable that today 45% of Australians were either born over the seas or had at least one parent. By any world standard that's enormous. Parliamentary secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services Laurie Ferguson says Harmony Day is a chance to recognise that community diversity has brought cultural, social and economic wealth to Australia. We speak over 300 languages originating from 230 countries. In less than a lifetime we've changed from an Anglo-Celtic society of fewer than 8 million people to a multicultural society of more than 22 million. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship is working with organisations such as the Australian Football League and Australian Federal Police to ensure all Australians get involved in Harmony Day. It is about a cohesive and inclusive community and from our point of view from a law enforcement agency that's truly important to us. The AFL running a community competition as well as sports clinics for football stars in the making. It is sport that often provides the ground under which people can play and come to a game without any of their background causing anything other than a celebration. Harmony Day events will continue throughout March.


Hi guys, what is up? Welcome to my channel. So for today's video, I have a very long awaited video. You guys are constantly asking me questions about what brushes I use and what my personal favorite brushes are. So today's video is all about my absolute favorite brushes and my absolute favorite brush brands. So if you are interested in hearing about some of my favorite brushes, then just keep watching. Something to know about me is that I use random brushes all the time. I use high-end brushes, luxury brushes, and then I'll use cheap brushes from the dollar store. Whatever works, whatever is within reach of my hand, you'll find me using. I also do bridal makeup, so I have a separate set of brushes that I use specifically for that. I'm a brush hoarder. I don't get rid of brushes. I keep them because I find I always end up using them later on. I'll find a different use for them as makeup trends go on. There's all these different uses for brushes. So I have so many. This video would be two hours long if I didn't do it the way that I'm doing it. So I am talking about my favorite brush brands with you guys, and then I will be selecting a few of my favorites from those brands. Even though these are my favorite brush brands, there's definitely a lot of other brushes that I use and love. But I did want to shove light on my favorite companies themselves and just show you what I love from them. There's probably a billion and one other brushes that I could talk about, but I just used so many that it would overwhelm me. So this was the best way to do it. I'm going to be talking about Wayne Goss, Sonya G, Ref for Esum, and Blinged Brushes. Those are the top five brands that I chose, and we're going to start off with the brand that I'm probably the least familiar with, but I do have a set that I love, and that is Wayne Goss. Wayne Goss has a wonderful line of makeup brushes. I definitely am very interested in trying more. It's just my wallet might not allow for that. His brushes are quite pricey, but my philosophy with spending a lot on brushes is that they literally last you forever. Brushes are so important for application. Even though I'll use super cheap brushes, I definitely do notice a difference in use when I do use my more high-end brushes. It just feels softer. Sometimes it lays the color down better. Sometimes it picks up the color better. I love Wayne Goss brushes. Now, I personally have never purchased a Wayne Goss brush for myself, just looking. He has a lot of wonderful brushes. He has a lot of wonderful shapes in his line. Definitely really need to try some of these out, just taking a look. But a subscriber last year was kind enough to send me the Wayne Goss the eye set, and I have used this set nonstop. I love the length of these brushes. I love the way that they feel in the hand, and it's just a set of five different blending brushes, and they all work so incredible. I cannot have enough blending brushes, so that is why I love this set so much. And I think if you are interested in getting into Wayne Goss eye brushes specifically, this is a great set to go for. It is $130, but these brushes are so sturdy, so well made, they're gonna last you forever. Currently, it looks like I'm beauty-lish. This is sold out, so I'm going to notify you on my community page when I do see these are back in stock. I'll put myself on the email list. If his brushes are like these eye brushes, they are super soft. They pick up the perfect amount of powder. And I just specifically for this set, I love the shape of the brushes and the sizes of the different blending brushes, so you can really get a good blend in. In case you want to purchase the brushes individually, my most used are the number 20 right here, because you can really get it into the lower lash line. Number 17 right here is the perfect size to blend out my colors as a transition blend. And then number 19 does a really nice job of putting in that deeper color. So these three are my favorite, but I definitely love all five. So this is my recommendation from Wayne Goss because it's the only one I've tried, but oh my gosh, these brushes definitely are top of the line exquisite quality. So now we're going to move on to Sonia G brushes. I do have more experience with her brushes than Wayne Goss. Again, I only own one set from Sonia G, but I have tried her other sets because my mom actually really loves Sonia G brushes. So I've tried hers. I've stolen them from her for this video just to talk about some of my favorites. But the set that I do have is called the Sky Face Set. I actually did a whole video on that if you would like to see my thoughts on those. But it comes with five face brushes. Again, it is returning soon. Sonia G is so hard to keep in stock. So you definitely have to jump on a release or a brush set when you want it. So it comes with five brushes and I absolutely 100% recommend this kit right here. It is quite pricey $270. I would say these brushes are very similar to Wayne Goss as far as the level of quality. I love the different hairs that she uses in this set. Now my favorite brushes in this set have to be the Mini Cheek from the Sky Face Set. It's such a unique shape where it's flat on one side and then kind of pinched on the other side. And I like it for highlighter personally. That's what I've been using for. It just really hits the cheek right where you want it. Super soft picks up the perfect amount of that product. The soft cheek is a very universal brush. That is why I like it so much. This brush you can use for contour or you can use it for blush as well. It's not too dense of a brush. So if you have a really pigmented blush, this is the perfect brush to go for because it does not pick up too much product. It just very softly puts the pigment on the face without it being too much. And without you having to go in and kind of blend it out. So I've been loving that brush. But nonetheless, I've been loving all of this. This whole set is absolutely incredible. But those are my two favorite from that set if you want to purchase them individually. Her regular kind of pro brushes come in the red handles. And like I said, these are my mom's. So I don't get the opportunity to use these every day. But some of my favorites that I would recommend. This is the Face Pro Brush.  Oh my gosh, I need to buy this for myself. I would love to own this, but I love it for bronzer. That's the only thing that I have used this brush for because it's so big and fat. It is perfect for that. I love the angle to get down through the cheek and kind of cut it. So beautiful and soft. And actually it's a little bit more dense, but it's soft. But it really picks up the color well and allows you to really manipulate it when you're blending the detail pro is also really nice. If you like a really nice detailed highlighter. So if you have like a, I would say a loose highlighter that has so much shine to it. That is what I would use this for to really just get right there to get that really powerful beam. I really like that. I love Sonia G for her face brushes. I think she has the best face brushes. Her eye brushes are also very nice. She has some eye sets as well. But for me personally, Wangos for the eyes. Sonia G for the best face brushes. Those are my recommendations for Sonia G. Let's move on. All right. So we are going to talk about refer brushes now. I think this might be my favorite brush brand. I don't know. It's a very, very tight race, but generally just kind of as a whole. I think refer has the best range of brushes. Now the whole concept behind the brand is very, very unique. They have a prototype program where they're just testing out the shapes to see what the customers like. And then they'll put it into full production. You can really customize the brushes that you want. You can have this handle right here, which isn't my favorite. I feel like it gets a little bit dirty. It feels a little bit more cheap, but again, they have these handles right here. These are the handles that I personally like. You can get them shiny. You can kind of customize the length if you like a longer brush or shorter brush. It's just a really neat brush company. Brushes are handmade in Japan. Sonia G and Wangos are as well. They just have a very interesting range of shapes and sizes, and they aren't afraid to play around and see what you like and what you don't like. They do send me their brushes. The owners of the company are super nice. It's just a really good company. Like if I were spending my money on this company, I would feel very good about where my money was going. It's going into the hands of good people who deserve it. I'm going to talk about some of the brushes that I really enjoy. Looking at the website right now, it looks like if you buy any brush set, you can get the P22 brush. Now this is the best bronzer brush. If you are a fan of that original Tom Ford bronzer brush, this is as close as it gets. Now the prices of refer are not super, super expensive, but they're kind of middle of the road. The brushes individually, yeah, they are a pretty penny, but most of the time they'll have really good deals on sets. I would wait till the holiday season or whenever they're having a deal.  They have really great deals, so I would definitely keep an eye out on that before you actually purchase. I should have a code coming soon for you guys to get a set. I don't know the specifics right now because they're out of stock, I believe, of the sets. They're trying to get those made and going, but once I do have that code, I will put it on my community tab for you guys. I don't get any commission from it or anything. It's just a code to help you out. I will definitely tell you when I know. The P22, I think if you order any brush set right now, you get this. This brush is $110, so that's a good deal. This brush is so soft, but it's the perfect density. It's the perfect shape for bronzing up the face. I absolutely love it. It feels so expensive. It feels so luxurious. I love the size of this handle. Definitely one of my favorite brushes from them. This number four brush, which is an angled blush brush. Again, one of my most used brushes. I use it for blush all the time. I love the angle. I love just patting on my blush with this super soft, perfect amount of density. The number four brush is one of my favorites. Number five, again, is a really great contoury bronzer brush.  This is great, but when you want something a little bit more precise, this is a great brush. You can also apply blush with it as well. It's just a really universal shape that I really enjoy. By the way, their eye brushes are also killer. So the number three brush is just the tiniest little pencil brush. It is great for any kind of detail that you want. Really fantastic for getting in the lower lash line for getting right here. Or when you do a cut crease, you can really place that color to the edge of the concealer super close. This is a very unique brush. I don't come across pencil brushes this small. So if you're into detail work or you have really small eyes, this is a fantastic brush. The number two brush is one of my favorite flat shader brushes. It just packs that color on there perfectly. You can make it wet. It is quite stiff, but it's still soft at the same time. It's just one of those brushes that you use every day. This is a very classic shape that everybody's going to use. I use this brush all the time. Specifically, they have two of my most favorite blending brushes of all time. The number 13 and the number 14. These are super small precision blending brushes. I have small eyes. I am half Asian. So I personally like a smaller brush that I can really blend as far as detail goes. And not to mention because I do a little bit more intricate looks for my Instagram and my YouTube and things like that. These brushes are amazing. You don't know you need a small blending brush until you have it and then you're like, how can I ever go back? So these are great precision blending brushes. I cannot get enough of them. They're my mom's favorite as well. She has a lot of them just because these are like the two most perfect shapes. And I feel like a lot of brands really don't have brushes these shapes. So these are amazing. You don't come across brushes like these every day. Definitely if you're going to get two brushes from Ruffer, it has to be these. They're awesome. So next we are going to talk about Esum brushes. Now Esum you can get on Muse Beauty Pro. They have sent me some brushes. I have purchased some brushes. I can't tell you which ones I purchased and which ones I didn't. But just so you know, they have sent me some, but I've also bought some. Now what I like about Esum is that they have different bristles. I would say that Ruffer, Sonya G and Wayne Goss, they all have very similar bristles because they're all made in Japan. The Esum brushes are definitely more unique. The bristles are different, but that's a good thing. It's more variety and I find my Esum brushes to be very heavy duty.  And these brushes are sturdy and they are going to last forever. So that is why I prefer Esum brushes in my makeup kit as opposed to personal use. But of course I use them personally as well. But I just think they're such robust brushes that I also use them in my makeup kit. So really quickly, I've got to talk about my girl Michelle's set. Michelle Wong did a collaboration with Esum and she curated her own brush set for them. And she did a fantastic job. In the set, you're getting five brushes. It is $125. It is currently on sale. And I believe by Valentine's Day, the set is done. That's the last day to purchase them. You need to get your hands on these because it's such a good set. She really curated some great brushes. So the first brush in here is the G34. This is one of my go-to everyday blending brushes.  The bristles are soft but they still grab the product very well. I love this. And then for a little bit more precision, we have the S33. And that's where you'll put your outer corner color on it. And then you have two lid brushes here. We have the W23 and the W21. This is Mama Bear. This is Baby Bear. I love these in particular because I feel like they handle being sprayed with water very well. So when you want to wet a product or wet an eyeshadow, these are the brushes I use. They're also quite stiff, not too stiff of course to where they're going to break the shadow when you put it in. But they're stiff enough to pick up the product and dig in there so you can really pack it onto the lid. Another one and a smaller one which is fantastic. And then the last brush is one of the most unique brushes. I have never seen another brush like this. This is the W36. It's really long and then it kind of tapers up to a point. And what I like this in particular for is on my cut creases, I will kind of redefine the outline of the concealer with that point. So this is a very unique brush. That's personally what I use it for. Definitely if you are interested, check this set out. But I do have a few brushes that I use every single day as well that I want to talk about. So first let's talk about my powder foundation brush. You guys know I wear powder foundation to work every day and I use the X57 to apply it. I love how small it is and how it fits in my hand. It is very dense but also soft and it is the perfect brush to pack on and blend out your powder foundation. You can get full coverage with this. You can get a light coverage. It all depends how you use it and how you spread it out. But this is an amazing brush.  They also have two of my favorite powder brushes. This is the X52. This is probably my all-time favorite blush brush. I just love the way it fits on the cheek. I like an angled brush but there's something about this rounded blush brush that really does it for me. It's perfect. It's small. You can do a lot of other things with it. You can contour with it. You can kind of buff everything out. You can set the face with it. Really great brush. And then you have the big version of it which is the X51. Again, it's just the bigger version of the X52. For this, I really like it to kind of set my whole face with powder. And then I also really like it for bronzer. Now, what I like about the bristles on these Esum brushes compared to Sonia G or Wingos is they're not as soft. Like, they are soft. They're not going to scratch you. But they do have a little bit more grab to them where they're going to grab the powders and pick up a little bit more. I'm not saying one is better than the other. It's just a different experience. They're not scratchy but they definitely pick up powder better. They're not too soft. And then the last brush that I want to talk about is the W25. This is, I guess, the even bigger version of the W23. And I use this to blend out concealer on my clients. So I actually don't really use this brush too much by myself. But this is the brush that I use to blend out concealer. I think it's the perfect shape. I don't get any streaks with this brush. Obviously for sanitary purposes, I don't use a sponge. So this is the perfect brush to really blend out liquid or cream concealer. It does a fabulous job. I really like to kind of spread that concealer out over the cheeks to cover that redness as well. So this is my concealer brush for my makeup kit. I love it. I have three of them. So that's all I have for Isam. We're going to move on to Blinged Brushes. Now the brands that I previously mentioned, they all use animal hair. And I know a lot of you guys don't want to use animal hair brushes. Blinged Brushes is one of my favorite synthetic hair companies. So Blinged Brushes is the brand that I would recommend you go to if you want synthetic hair brushes. If you want these brushes, you have to keep an eye out for their restocks because they are hard to get a hold of. So just a fair warning, they were kind enough to send me these brushes, but I can't go back. Like these are the best gifts for people. I've been using them every day for the last two months. I can't stop using them and they're the most beautiful brushes ever. So what is special about Blinged Brushes is that they actually hand jewel these brushes. So these are the beautiful brushes that you see me using. Collectively, you can display these brushes in like a clear glass. Aren't these absolutely stunning. I cleaned them for you guys for this video because I've been using them nonstop, but I love these. So they have three different collections. So I'm going to go through the collections and then I'm going to tell you my favorite brushes from the collections. I'm going to have a giveaway on these, so keep watching till the end and you'll hear about that giveaway. This is the 12 piece Bring on the Bling Silver Collection. Now this is the collection I personally recommend the most for you to pick up because I just like the way the bristles are on these the most. And not only that, but personally the silver handles really just get me going.  So my favorite brushes in this collection particularly are the F5. You can purchase the brushes individually or in a set by the way, but the F5 is what I use to set my under eyes or to kind of shove away that fallout. It's a super soft brush. Like these are really, these are very high quality brushes and they're not super expensive. These are probably I think the cheapest of the brushes that I mentioned because this 12 set is $132. But the F5, oh my gosh, is perfect for cleaning up the under eye area. That's personally what I use it for. I use it every day. The F1 I really like as just a setting powder brush everywhere or to blend my bronzer and my blush together. Like these literally feel like real hair by the way. I love the E3 because it's a really small blending brush.  Again, super soft. So those are my favorite three brushes from this collection. Again, the F5, the F1 and the E3. There are other great brushes in this collection and brushes that you can use with cream products as well. But those three are my favorite. Oh, I almost forgot. F4, also great angled blush brush. So the next collection that they have is the 12 piece Bring on the Bling Rose Gold collection. So the handles on these are actually rose gold with the jeweling on top and then the bristles are pink. These are just as soft. But personally, I feel like there's something about these bristles that grab the powder product a little bit better. But these still are really fantastic. And this set is even cuter because it's a pink top like this set. I don't even want to use because it's just so pretty on display. Honestly, I most use brushes from this line. We have the E3, which is just that blending brush. Some of the brushes are repeated from the other collection, by the way. So like I still like the F4 and the F5. Like these are the traditional shapes that I really enjoy. I mean, just so you know, like they do have the same names. They just come from different collections. But here's the F1 from this collection and here's the F1.  I feel like the bristles work a little bit different. They're really big fluffy brushes. I really do like. I also, the F2, by the way, is such a unique brush. It's like a flat top brush. I've been using it to blend out cream contour and this looks works really good. You just have to make sure that the contour you use is very creamy. And then the last collection that we have is the 13 piece Starry Nights collection. Now this one, if you like the black handles or you like the darkness, these are absolutely gorgeous as well. Honestly, this brush collection though has my favorite brushes. I love the shapes of the brushes in this collection the most. My absolute most used brush from all of Blinked Brushes is the F17 here.  But I actually have been using this for highlight nonstop. This has been my go-to everyday highlight brush because it's the perfect shape and it has the perfect amount of density to really blend the product out into your skin. Honestly, if you're going to get one brush from Blinked Brushes, this is my favorite. Also, my favorite bronzer brush from them is the F11. It's that shape where it's a little bit more fanned out but it still is a pretty fat brush. So you can turn it to give yourself a little bit more of a contour and then if you want more surface area, the way you turn it is how it'll go. And this does a really nice job with bronzer. I really like it. It's a great synthetic haired bronzer brush. Super wonderful. I've been using that quite a lot. F14, another great angled blush brush.  This is the F11 and the F12. I haven't used this one too much. It's really big. The E12 is a really great classic blending brush. Anyways, if you're going to tell, I really love these brushes. The aesthetic of them is everything. Even if you purchase these for display, like I would not dodge you. They are so stunning, a really great company. And if you go on the website, they have a lot of different sets for you to choose from as well. So you don't have to buy the whole collection. You can purchase different bundles, like an eye bundle, or like a three-piece bundle. Or you can purchase each of the brushes individually. That's why I wanted to go over some of my favorite individual brushes. But I've been loving those. I think they're stunning. I had to mention them because I love like sparkly things. So Blink brushes has actually reached out to me and we decided that we are going to do a giveaway. They are so extremely kind. So the winner is going to get to choose a set from Blink brushes and then they will send them on over. So here are the rules to the giveaway and what you have to do if you want to win a Blink brushes set. You have to follow me on Instagram first of all at Morgan Turner makeup because that is how I am going to contact the winner. So if you don't follow me on Instagram, I will know.  And a question that I want you to answer is what is your number one favorite most used face brush and your number one favorite most used eye brush? So again, make sure you're following me on Instagram and of course make sure you're subscribed to me and make sure you're following Blink brushes as well on Instagram. Come back to this video, comment your Instagram handle and your two favorite brushes. And the giveaway is going to end one week from today. The day that this is posted, I will contact you on Instagram and we will get that moving forward. So really excited about this giveaway. If you aren't sure about the details, I will put them in the description box as well. And yeah, that's super exciting. Thank you Blink brushes for working with me on that. So anyways, that is all I have for today's video. I feel like it was kind of a long one, but I could talk about brushes all day. There are so many other brushes that I use that I did not mention in this video. But anyways, thank you guys so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you found it helpful. If you are not yet subscribed to my channel, I sure do hope you take the time to do so. And I will see you guys in my next video. Bye guys. Have a good one.