In the afternoon of May 17, 2016, Dr.Tom Rapoport,Investigator ofHoward Hughes Medical Instituteand Professor of cell biology in Harvard Medical School,gave a lecture on “Mechanism of ERAD elucidated with purified components” as part of ShanghaiTech’s Life Science Seminar Series.
Dr.Rapoportstudies several aspects of cellular protein secretion, includingthe mechanisms by which newly synthesized proteins are translocated from the cytosol to the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum, how reticulons and related proteins regulate the morphology of the endoplasmic reticulum, and how misfolded secretory proteins are degraded by endoplasmicreticulum associated protein degradation (ERAD). ERAD is a conserved protein quality control pathway, which eliminates misfolded or damaged proteins of the ER by exporting them into the cytoplasm for degradation by the ubiquitin proteasome system. It alleviates cytotoxic stress imposed by protein misfolding, which plays an important role in preserving cellular homeostasis.The ERAD pathway requires several protein complex cooperation, such as Hrd1p complex and Cdc48p ATPase complex.Tom Rapoportet al. found thatHrd1p was the central membrane component in ERAD-l; its overexpression bypasses the need for the other components of the Hrd1p-complex. The delivery of substrate through ER membrane requires the presence of transmembrane segments of Hrd1p, and depends on both the ubiquitin ligase activity of Hrd1p and the function of the Cdc48p ATPase complex. Furthermore, Dr.Rapoport also shared us with thenew research progress of his lab on reconstituted models ofERAD pathway with purified proteins.
【Tom Rapoport】
In January, 1995 Tom Rapoport joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School, arriving from the Max-Delbrück-Institute for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. He graduated with honors and earned his Ph.D. from Humboldt University in 1972. Immediately following this, Dr. Rapoport became an investigator of the Zentralinstitut für Molekularbiologie der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, which later became the Max-Delbrück-Institute. Since 1985, he has served as Professor of Cell Biology and group leader. In July of 1997 Tom was appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, member of the Leopodina Academy, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
