DSSS - Decoding Cellular Quality Control via Evolutionary Cell Biology

Our long-term objective is to discover the molecular mechanisms of cellular quality control that enable eukaryotic organisms to survive and thrive across diverse environments. By unlocking these fundamental processes, we aspire to establish novel strategies to enhance stress tolerance in plant and human cells. To achieve our goal, we propose an integrative approach rooted in comparative cell biology. We aim to sample the extraordinary diversity embedded across the eukaryotic tree of life to discover new autophagy pathways. We then leverage a comprehensive suite of cutting-edge cell biological and biochemical tools to dissect these novel quality control pathways and their contribution to organismal homeostasis. During my talk, I will summarize our recent discoveries obtained through cross-species interactome analysis and phylogenomic profiling, and illustrate how these approaches are revealing conserved principles and unexpected innovations in cellular quality control.