Objective
Cells use a battery of cell-surface proteins to monitor their environment, communicate and take up nutrients. The mechanisms driving the temporal and spatial distribution of plasma membrane are therefore of critical importance for growth and development. Endocytosis dependent on ubiquitin (Ub) has been mostly involved in the retrieval of cell-surface proteins and their targeting to the lysosome/vacuole for degradation in mammals and yeast.
Higher plants evolved from an ancient branch of the eukaryotic tree and are more distant from animals and yeast than the latter two are from each other. In parallel, a huge number of gene families in plants have undergone independent expansion and a significant percentage of plant genes have no orthologs in yeast and animals. As such, a great number of endocytic processes in plants are mediated by factors known in animals but used i) in different ways, ii) mediated by plant-specific factors, or iii) using factors belonging to dramatically expanded families for which no functional information is available.
My work recently demonstrated the existence of Ub-mediated endocytosis in plants, using the root iron transporter IRT1 as a model. IRT1 represents a unique opportunity to address ubiquitin-dependent trafficking and to study the functional link between a fundamental cellular process and its nutritional outcome at the level of the multicellular plant organism. In this proposal, I aim to identify the precise roles of ubiquitination in the dynamics of plant cell-surface proteins and shed light on the machinery driving Ub-dependent internalization and sorting in plants. This proposal is based on novel and large scale biochemical and genetic approaches in synergy with systematic use of cell biology and phenotypic analyis. This work is expected to lead to the identification and characterization of a large number of new key factors in the plant endocytic pathway and shed light on the evolution of eukaryotic membrane systems.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- natural sciencesbiological sciencescell biology
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologymammalogy
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Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG
See other projects for this call
Coordinator
75794 Paris
France