Invited by Paul Conduit, Ivana Gasic will present and IJM seminar on the theme:
Autoregulated control of tubulin mRNA stability
Abstract :
Microtubule cytoskeleton plays crucial roles in cellular architecture, intracellular transport, and mitosis. The availability of free tubulin subunits impacts polymerization dynamics and microtubule function. When cells sense excess free tubulin, they stop further tubulin biosynthesis via controlled degradation of the encoding mRNAs, through poorly understood mechanism termed tubulin autoregulation. In this talk, I will present our recent advances in identifying the ribosome-binding specificity factor which recognizes nascent tubulins as they emerge from the ribosomes. This factor further recruits an adaptor protein and the effector mRNA decay machinery that ultimately degrades tubulin-encoding transcripts. Mutations in the core components of the tubulin autoregulation pathway have been linked to human disease, such as neurodevelopment disorders, male sterility, and retinopathies, but the pathomechanisms have remained elusive. Our ongoing works shows that tubulin autoregulation is required for proper functioning of the microtubule cytoskeleton and accurate mitotic cell division in cultured human cells.