Marco Fabbro (Molinari Group) won the best poster award at the Swiss Autophagy Meeting 2024, held in Lausanne on September 12-13, 2024, with the poster entitled “Evaluating ER-phagy activity through endogenously tagged ER-phagy receptors.”
Marco Fabbro is a second-year doctoral student at IRB Bellinzona studying the mechanisms regulating ER-phagy in the Protein Folding and Quality control laboratory, directed by Prof. Dr. Maurizio Molinari. ER-phagy is a series of catabolic pathways afferent to lysosomes, ensuring the maintenance of homeostasis of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), the organelle that produces proteins, lipids and sugars within our cells.
The poster presented at the conference discusses the generation of cell lines where three different endogenous ER-phagy receptors were tagged through CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to study the mechanisms that regulate this process in a physiological context. The tag used, HaloTag, is a bacterial enzyme engineered to covalently bind different types of molecules, including various fluorescent ligands. Compared with other fluorescent tags such as GFP and CHERRY, HaloTag offers several advantages, including the ability to monitor the intracellular processes studied in our laboratory in real time with light and electron microscopy.
