Novick Lab
Principal Investigator: Peter Jay Novick
Institution: University of California San Diego (La Jolla, CA)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Project Summary The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) undergoes autophagic degradation in response to the accumulation of aggregated proteins within its lumen or in response to starvation. We have proposed that in yeast, actin assembly at sites of contact between the cortical ER (cER) and endocytic pits is required to displace elements of the cER from their association with the plasma membrane so that they can interact with the autophagosome assembly machinery near the vacuole. To test our model, we will determine if the requirement in cER-phagy for actin assembly at endocytic pits can be bypassed by deleting all six genes encoding ER-plasma membrane tethers (DTether). If the role of actin assembly is to push the cER away from the plasma membrane, the DTether mutations should bypass the need for actin assembly in ER-phagy. We will ask if the bypass of actin assembly is specific to cER-phagy or if actin-related defects in other selective autophagy pathways, such as nucleophagy, mitophagy, and pexophagy are also bypassed. As an additional test we will ask if an artificial ER-plasma membrane tether can block cER- phagy in both wild type and the DTether strain. Extensive parallels between ER-…
Active NIH Awards
- 3R01GM035370-41S1: Genetics of secretion in yeast (2026)
- 5R01GM035370-41: Genetics of secretion in yeast (2026)
- 1R21AG100440-01: Roles for a novel component in nucleophagy and chronological aging (2026)
- 5R01GM035370-40: Genetics of secretion in yeast (2025)
- 2R01GM035370-39: Genetics of secretion in yeast (2024)
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