The orchestration of subcellular processes through RNA and protein interactions

The orchestration of subcellular processes through RNA and protein interactions

Prof Kathryn Lilley; University of Cambridge

Kathryn received her BSc. and PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Sheffield. After being a laboratory manager for eleven years at the University of Leicester, she established the Cambridge Centre for Proteomics, University of Cambridge in 2001. She became the Professor in Cellular Dynamics in Department of Biochemistry University of Cambridge in 2012. She directs a research programme focused on the development and application of technologies to map RNA and protein subcellular localization on a cell-wide scale. Her research looks at the effect of post transcriptional and post translational processing on location, and the extent of re-localization in response to cellular stress and disease. She was awarded the Juan Pablo Albar Proteome Pioneer Award from the European Proteomics Association in 2017 and received the HUPO Distinguished Achievements in Proteomics award in 2018. She was elected as a member of EMBO in July 2020 and Academia Europaea in May 2023.

The biological intricacy of a cell is only partially explained by protein expression. Added layers of complexity are provided by non-coding RNA mediated control mechanisms, post-transcriptional and post-translation processing, and the subcellular localisation and interactions of both proteins and RNA. It is crucial to our understanding of biological processes to be able to capture these additional layers of complexity. In this talk, I will discuss how we can map the dynamics of RNA-protein interactions during key cellular processes. I will also introduce a new approach for the simultaneous mapping of the both the subcellular spatial proteome and transcriptome on a cell-wide scale. I will demonstrate how we have used this approach to show the orchestrated re-localisation of RNA and protein upon the induction of the unfolded protein response (UPR) giving essential insights into the rules governing re-localisation of RNA to stress granules.

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