Mobility grant to study how cells clean up damage
Karolina Spustova, researcher in the Cancer molecular medicine group headed by Prof Jorrit Enserink, has been awarded 6.6 million NOK from the Research Council of Norway. The project, TiGeR, will investigate how cells regulate selective autophagy.
Cells continuously remove damaged or excess components through a process called selective autophagy. This quality control is essential for keeping cells healthy, and when it fails it has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic disorders and ageing. Researchers have learned a lot about how selective autophagy works, but little is known about its regulators.
In TiGeR (Time-Resolved Functional Genomics of Selective Autophagy Regulation), Spustova will map this regulation across the entire yeast genome for three forms of selective autophagy: mitophagy, ribophagy and ER-phagy, which clear out mitochondria, ribosomes and parts of the endoplasmic reticulum. By combining high-throughput microscopy with deep learning, the project will follow individual cells over time. This will show not only which genes affect these processes, but also when they act: at the start of the response, while it is running, or when it is shut down.
The grant is an international mobility grant. Spustova will spend two years at the University of Toronto, in the laboratories of Professors Charles Boone and Brenda Andrews, whose functional genomics infrastructure is among the most advanced in the world. She will then return to Oslo University Hospital and the Centre for Cancer Cell Reprogramming (CanCell) to integrate the data, validate candidate regulators and establish the platform locally.
"By revealing the regulators that control selective autophagy dynamics, we hope to build a resource that helps the field better understand how these processes are orchestrated in time," says Spustova.
Links:
The Cancer Molecular Medicine research group, headed by Jorrit Enserink
Announcement Research Council of Norway (in Norwegian), :
269 millioner kroner til toppforskning på blant annet matematikk- og leseferdigheter