Session Abstract
My earliest interest in science came with a squint into the plastic lens of a toy microscope where I observed the amazing microbial world of single-cell organisms crawling and swimming across my field of vision. This passion grew through high school, college and graduate school, where I learned to understand life processes at a molecular level. In 1976, my first year as a Berkeley faculty member, I had the great good fortune to attract a stellar PhD student, Peter Novick, with whom I embarked on a search for the genes that control the process of protein secretion. Our chromosomes encode ~ 23,000 genes which encode the protein molecules that make cells and catalyze the chemistry of life. All of these proteins are made inside the cell but some fraction of them, roughly 30% including molecules such as insulin, must be exported out of the cell to work elsewhere in the body. Just as commercial goods are exported by some kind of traffic conveyance, secreted proteins are packaged into membrane carriers called vesicles for traffic within and ultimately, out of the cell. My lab devised genetic and biochemical techniques to discover the secretory machinery in a simple single-cell organism, Yeast. Biological evolution has conserved this machinery such that the very genes and proteins we discovered in yeast have been found to operate throughout our body to organize the secretion of hormones, growth factors, antibodies, chemical neurotransmitters and all the things our body uses for normal physiology. As is often the case, fundamental discoveries such as this one have unexpected practical applications. Yeast cells are used to manufacture and secrete large quantities of clinically important proteins, such as recombinant human insulin. Some of the genes we discovered were also found to be the basis of human genetic diseases. I will discuss some examples of this and how our interests have evolved into a major effort to find the molecular and cellular basis of Parkinson’s Disease.
Speaker Bio
Randy Schekman is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). He studied the enzymology of DNA replication as a graduate student with Arthur Kornberg at Stanford University. His current interest in cellular membranes developed during a postdoctoral period with S. J. Singer at the University of California, San Diego. Schekman’s laboratory investigates the mechanism of membrane protein traffic in the secretory pathway in eukaryotic cells. In recent years his lab has turned to aspects of vesicular traffic in human cells, most recently on the biogenesis and sorting of small RNAs into extracellular vesicles.
Among his awards are the Gairdner International Award, the Albert Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with James Rothman and Thomas Südhof. From 2006 – 2011 he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011, he founded and until 2019 served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Access journal, eLife, sponsored by the HHMI, Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Society. Beginning in 2018, Schekman assumed a leadership role in an effort supported by the Sergey Brin Family Foundation to identify and support basic research on the mechanisms of Parkinson’s Disease initiation and progression (https://parkinsonsroadmap.org).