PRBB-CRG Sessions Antonina Roll-Mecak

02/10/202612:00MARIE CURIEPRBB-CRG SessionsAntonina Roll-MecakNational Institutes of Health"Track control: how neurons sculpt and tune their microtubule cytoskeletons"Host: Isabelle VernosAbstract:Our every movement and thought is brought about by a complex network of neuronal connections precisely patterned through the dynamic organization of the microtubule cytoskeleton. Even subtle perturbation in microtubule regulation leads to cognitive and behavioral deficits. Neuronal processes contain bundles of microtubules that serve as tracks for the large volume of bidirectional cellular traffic necessary for efficient communication between distant neuronal compartments. Molecular motors functioning in this crowded environment encounter a dense mesh of microtubule associated proteins (MAPs) and intrinsically disordered tubulin tails that are modified with abundant and chemically diverse posttranslational modifications. My talk will take a journey across scales, starting from the atomic structure and mechanism of tubulin code writers and erasers and their interplay to generate complex modification patterns, to the visualization of microtubule architecture in situ in the human axon and the elucidation of molecular mechanisms of processive and selective cargo transport that arise at the intersection of these two regulatory layers of tubulin modifications and MAPs. By closely integrating imaging-driven in vivo physiological discovery with complex in vitro reconstitution and bridging these approaches through new chemical biology tools we developed, my lab aims to achieve a multiscale understanding of cytoarchitecture development and adaptation.