Our Laboratory
During the last decade, biology has gone through a technology-driven revolution with the emergence of high-throughput methods. Yeast has been an excellent model organism for these efforts, allowing the collection of large amounts of systematic data. However, there remains a huge gap between the amount of data generated and its ability to put forward high quality predictions that can be followed up to obtain true mechanistic understanding of cellular functions. My lab aims to bridge the gap by using high throughput methods in combination with detailed follow up to provide mechanistic understanding of fundamental unresolved questions in cell biology.
The Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) is the entry site into the eukaryotic secretory pathway. Within it all secreted and membrane bound proteins must fold and mature. The main questions that interest my lab revolve around the biogenesis, inheritance and homeostatic mechanisms of the ER in yeast. The central functions of the ER (e.g., lipid biosynthesis; ion homeostasis; and translocation, folding, processing and trafficking of secreted and membrane bound proteins) are highly conserved and crucial to many metazoan processes, including development and the function of the immune, neuronal and endocrine systems. Mutations in any of these processes result in a large number of human diseases including CFTR, diabetes, heart attack, lipidosis and immunological and neurological disorders. Therefore using the power of yeast to ask these questions has broad implications on our understanding of mammalian cellular functions.
 |
 |