The long and winding roads of the cell

Intracellular membrane trafficking is essential for many cellular processes and its impairment leads to over 80 major human diseases. Elaborating our understanding of the molecular mechanisms regulating membrane trafficking will be invaluable for developing future strategies to tackle trafficking related pathophysiologies, resulting in improving the quality of life for those afflicted. We seek to address fundamental, open questions in membrane trafficking by assembling a highly interdisciplinary research team to integrate biochemical, genetic and cutting-edge biophysics tools.

Your project will allow you to:

1. Determine spatial localization patterns for recycling. To test the hypothesis that cargo trafficking occurs via two distinct surface recycling routes we will map the patterns of dynamic spatial localization of the endolysosomal system and recycling cargoes in live yeast.

2. Characterize transcriptional/metabolic control of recycling. We will use glucose depletion as a stress factor to study the interplay between transcriptional and metabolic control of recycling, testing hypotheses that transcriptional upregulation of endocytosis is mediated through the Mig1 repressor, and inhibition of surface recycling is initiated by novel factors we have identified.

3. Determine factors driving endosomal protein sorting. We predict surface recycling depends on the physical separation of endosomal proteins from maturing endosomes, and will test how the local intracellular