REPU MAGAZINE N 3
News
2017
An interview with
Nicholas Ingolia
Professor at UC Berkeley
Lidia Llacsahuanga, REPUBiology 2017, sat down
with her Principal Investigator, Nicholas Ingolia, to
share her research and some thoughts about the
REPU program.
What kind of research do you do in your
laboratory? of that: an opportunity to really see how we do
science. So yeah, I think it's really great.
We are broadly interested in understanding the
translational control of gene expression. So, why is it
that some RNAs are translated better than others, and
why some RNAs are translated much better in some
conditions and not well at all in others. What is your overall opinion on Lidia's
performance and would you be willing to
recommend the program?
Yeah! It's really been a pleasure to have Lidia here. I
think that she has made some real progress in a
project that has been going on in the lab, something
that is really a pretty central interest of ours and that
we've been working on for a while. She's really moved
that forward and it's been great to have her around to
interact with students and postdocs in the lab. She's
really brought a lot to the lab too. It's been great to
have her.
We use a variety of techniques to measure and
perturb translation. One particular challenge we run
into is that many of the core proteins that are involved
in translation initiation are essential; so we are not able
to knock them out. And even if we deplete them, it is
very quickly toxic to cells. So one of the things we
really wanted to do is a better genetic approach to very
rapidly deplete some of these core proteins, so we can
look at the immediate effects of their depletion. That
will give us a better understanding of what they are
normally doing in the cell during translation.
And that's something we've been working on this
spring: a way to very rapidly deplete these proteins.
This is sort of co-opting a system that plants use to
rapidly degrade certain proteins in response to plant
hormones. So we can transplant that whole system
into budding yeast, which is one of our favorite model
organisms to work with.
Then, in yeast, we can rapidly target some of these
proteins, like the cap-binding protein, and target that
for rapid degradation, which lets us see what happens
to cells when that protein goes away quickly.
What do you think of the REPU program?
Figure 1. Ingolia’s Group with Lidia Llacsahuanga
I think it's a wonderful program! Certainly, from my
perspective, it was great to have Lidia here visiting in
the lab. I know that she got to work very closely with
an experienced postdoc. I know that he really enjoyed
that opportunity. And I think that she really got a lot out
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