Researchers identify a new player in ER homeostasis during stress.
Christin Naumann and Steffen Abel have recently contributed to an eLife publication by Yasin Dagdas' Group from the GMI Vienna. The team of researchers identified a novel player in plant ER-phagy, the removal of endoplasmatic reticulum (ER) domains via autophagy.
During starvation or stress conditions, the ER may accumulate misfolded, toxic proteins. To counteract this ER stress, eukaryotic cells can remove entire sections of affected ER. In this process called ER-phagy, a phagophore membrane structure engulfs a portion of the ER and eventually forms the autophagosome for degradation of its contents.
With their study, Dagdas and team wanted to shed more light on ER quality control processes in connection with ER-phagy. Employing affinity screening, they could identify C53, a cytosolic ER-phagy receptor that is conserved across the plant and mammalian kingdom. In their paper, they present how C53 interacts with other essential players: namely (1) with ER-associated proteins that signal stalled ribosomes and thus errors in protein translation and (2) with ATG8, a component of the phagophore. Thus, C53 helps in recruiting ER-portions with misfolded proteins to autophagosomes. Finally, with the help of IPB researchers, they demonstrated that C53-dependent ER-phagy processes in plants are essential for stress tolerance during phosphate starvation.
In the beginning of this year, Christin Naumann had spent a 6-week research stay at Dagdas’ Lab in Vienna supported by an EMBO Short Term Fellowship. Studying plant phosphate starvation led Naumann into plant autophagy a few years ago. But the connection to the autophagy researchers from Vienna was not without an intermediary. Through the MLU mentoring program for young female scientists, Naumann got to know autophagy expert Claudine Kraft from the University of Freiburg who accepted her as a mentee. “Claudine who actually works on yeast and mammalian cells was the one who connected me with Yasin Dagdas from the plant field.” Naumann recalls, “This led to a really fruitful and open collaboration with Yasin’s team and we will definitely continue on the project.”
Original publication:
M Stephani, L Picchianti, A Gajic, R Beveridge, E Skarwan, V Sanchez de Medina Hernandez, A Mohseni, M Clavel, Y Zeng, C Naumann, M Matuszkiewicz, E Turco, C Loefke, B Li, G Dürnberger, M Schutzbier, H Tieh Chen, A Abdrakhmanov, A Savova, K-S Chia, A Djamei, I Schaffner, S Abel, L Jiang, K Mechtler, F Ikeda, S Martens, T Clausen, Y Dagdas. A cross-kingdom conserved ER-phagy receptor maintains endoplasmic reticulum homeostasis during stress. eLife 2020;9:e58396 doi: 10.7554/eLife.58396
