on October 3, 2019
Marisa Loi, PhD student in the Protein Folding and Quality Control laboratory headed by Prof. Maurizio Molinari, received an award for the best poster presentation at the EMBO Autophagy Workshop 2019.
The poster entitled “ESCRT-III-driven piecemeal micro-ER-phagy remodels the ER during recovery from ER stress” describes a new catabolic pathway activated to remodel the mammalian endoplasmic reticulum (ER) on recovery from ER stress. The ER is a plastic and highly dynamic organelle that fulfills important functions including calcium storage, protein and lipid synthesis, secretion and transport. Physiological or pathological perturbations of ER homeostasis activate unfolded protein responses that increase ER size and content. On stress resolution, the ER is remodeled to pre-stress conditions via recov-ER-phagy, a catabolic process where the ER receptor SEC62 controls lysosomal delivery of excess ER produced during the stress phase. In this work Marisa showed that, in contrast to other types of ER-phagy, where ER subdomains to be cleared from cells are captured by double membrane autophagosomes on their way to degradative lysosomes, recov-ER-phagy relies on direct capture of excess ER by degradative endolysosomes in processes that are topologically consistent with micro-ER-phagy and rely on intervention of the ESCRT-III machinery.
General information concerning the EMBO conference: http://meetings.embo.org/event/19-autophagy.
