Junior Group: Screening of Cellular Networks

Research Focus

Membrane trafficking ensures the delivery of proteins and lipids to their proper cellular destinations and, by this, regulates cellular homeostasis and growth. An elaborate molecular machinery secures tight spatial and temporal regulation of the trafficking steps. The detailed knowledge about diverse trafficking regulators is indispensable to understand the pathology of numerous human diseases associated with trafficking defects (e.g., Alzheimer or cystic fibrosis). An emerging theme, so far very little understood, is the potential role of trafficking as an adaptive response system reacting to diverse inside and outside clues. For instance, through changing the repertoire of secreted proteins, mRNAs, miRNAs and other, cells can suppress growth and migration of cancer cells. The complex regulation of membrane trafficking can only be incompletely explained by the activity of protein-coding genes. A major goal of my research is to understand the impact of ncRNAs on individual regulators and entire regulatory networks of membrane trafficking, as well as the cellular consequences of ncRNA-mediated regulation.