Allan Drummond (University of Chicago)

     (Graduate Students Initiated)

IMPACT Lecture Series

"Rethinking the Cellular Stress Response"

Abstract:   Cells across the tree of life respond to sudden unfavorable changes--stresses--in similar ways. Following a range of primordial stresses such as heat shock, proteins and mRNAs form clumps, certain genes turn on, and protein synthesis and cell growth sharply decline. The standard interpretation of these long-studied phenomena has held that, in the case of heat shock, thermal energy causes proteins to misfold, forming toxic aggregates that require cleanup by the induced chaperone proteins. Substantial challenges to this misfolding-catastrophe interpretation have remained. A fundamentally different picture emerges from recent work: aggregation instead reflects evolved, adaptive biomolecular condensation processes integral to the sensing of temperature and other environmental change, and chaperones regulate these condensed states. I will discuss molecular and physiological evidence for this alternative perspective, and its implications for a wide range of stress responses and environmental sensing problems.

Originally published at chemistry.nd.edu.