Mikhail conducted the award-winning research at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Bellinzona, affiliated with Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), as a PhD student in the laboratory led by Maurizio Molinari. The prestigious ETH medal is awarded to less than 8% of the ETH students that successfully conclude their thesis. For instance, in the 2023-2024 academic year cohort (awarded leading into 2025), 35 out of 459 graduating doctoral candidates were selected to receive this recognition.
Mikhail Rudinskiy’s doctoral thesis provides a mechanistic framework for how cells selectively remodel and recycle damaged, excess or aged portions of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and mitochondria. During his PhD, Mikhail established the concept that organellophagy receptors – proteins responsible for the elimination of portions of organelles – do more than tether problematic organelles to specialized degradative organelles. Instead, he proposed that they coordinate remodeling, partitioning, and autophagic degradation into a unified and sequential process. This work changes the way scientists think about organellophagy receptors, revealing them as active players that sculpt organelles into degradation-competent portions before lysosomal clearance. The findings on the molecular mechanisms of organelle partitioning were published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Cell Biology.
Beyond the mechanistic work on organellophagy receptors, a substantial part of Mikhail Rudinskiy’s work includes the development and application of quantitative molecular tools that allow to measure how damaged portions of organelles and misfolded proteins are transported to lysosomes for degradation. These methods provide powerful new ways to study cellular quality control and may help advance research into diseases associated with defective protein and organelle recycling.
This is the second ETH Medal awarded to a researcher under the mentorship of Maurizio Molinari. In 2020, Ilaria Fregno received this prestigious distinction for her groundbreaking research on how cells eliminate misfolded proteins from the ER through acidic degradative compartments. Her work provided a mechanistic description of this process and introduced the term “ER-to-lysosome-associated degradation” (ERLAD), a pathway through which cells remove large or complex protein aggregates and substrates that cannot be efficiently processed by the primary ER quality-control mechanism, ER-associated degradation (ERAD).
Mikhail Rudinskiy’s thesis is available for consultation at the Research Collection of the ETH library at this link.
