In SatelliteHomeostasis Project. Elif Nur FIRAT KARALAR and her team aims to understand the evolutionary processes of the complex organization of mammalian cells, thus developing new diagnostic and treatment methods for diseases such as developmental disorders or cancer.
KARALAR's first ERC Project CentSatRegFunc was funded in ERC 2015 Starting Grant call and she is the first double grantee in Turkiye in life sciences domain. KARALAR received EMBO Young Investigator Award in 2019 and TÜBİTAK Encouragement Award in 2021 and she was funded by TÜBİTAK BİDEB-2247-A National Outstanding Research Programme. Her project proposal was supported within the scope of TÜBİTAK's ERC Principal Investigator Advancement Program (EBAG).
Call: ERC-2022-StG
Project Durationi: 5 years
Projecy Acronym: SatelliteHomeostasis
Project Title: Spatiotemporal regulation of centriolar satellite homeostasis
Project ID: 101078097
Host Institution: Koc University, Türkiye
Panel: LS3 - Cell Biology, Development, Stem Cells and Regeneration
Related ERC Proof of Concept Project: -
Objective
Membrane-less compartmentalization has emerged as a powerful, yet mysterious, process for the spatiotemporal control of fundamental cellular processes. How the identity of a membrane-less organelle is established, maintained, and dynamically altered remains unclear. In this project, I will investigate the fascinating biology of the centriolar satellites (hereafter CS), a vertebrate-specific membrane-less organelle. CS was first discovered as granules that cluster and move around centrosomes – major microtubule-organizing centers of animal cells. Recently, my lab and others have placed CS in a new pathway for targeting proteins to centrosomes and cilia, and identified an important role for CS in cell division, cellular signalling and neurogenesis. While CS functions shone light in these organelles, little is known about their own biochemistry and how that affects their function.
Recent studies, including my own, revealed unique and intriguing CS properties that likely underlie the rules underpinning their regulation and function. The properties of CS granules are regulated in space, time and tissue, as we observe differential size and composition within the cell and in different cell types. Building on these discoveries, I hypothesise that CS perform its different functions by acting as adaptive organelles that remodel its granule features in response to intrinsic and extrinsic cues. With this project I propose to investigate the molecular basis of (1) CS scaffold assembly and disassembly, (2) CS granule size, composition, architecture and dynamics; and (3) CS heterogeneity within a cell and in different cell types. This project will combine in vitro reconstitution, imaging-based assays, a new SatelliteGFP mouse and our expertise in proximity proteomics and biochemical purifications. Our results will have broad implications in unveiling how cells organize its cytoplasm in time and space appropriate to its differentiation status, environment and organismal health.
(Resource: CORDIS)
