Physics Graduate Student Seminar with Aline Arra on "Yeast? aka Systems-Level Robustness and Fragility in the Cellular Organelle Network"

A defining feature of the eukaryotic cell is its organization into membrane bound compartments called organelles. While each type of organelle has critical functions of their own, they also make up a dynamic network that is responsible for vital cellular processes such as organelle biogenesis and metabolic regulation. By genetically breaking interorganelle links formed by protein tethers called organelle contact sites, it is possible to dissect these interactions. I aim to address the impact of the systems-level interaction between organelles on cellular processes by measuring organelle composition and metabolic flow changes due to perturbations to the network. For organelle composition measurements at a single cell resolution, our lab has created a strain of budding yeast that expresses fluorescent labels for six organelles that is then imaged with hyperspectral confocal microscopy. My data suggests that while cell growth and vitality is robust to network perturbations, there is fragility on smaller scales, including the organelles and their subparts.

This lecture was made possible by the William C. Ferguson fund.