Molecular Physiology of the Cell

A relaxation single day all together in Venice ?  This is possible thanks to the excellent low-cost connection between Gosselies and Venice, so we made it ! The weather was not so good but we could enjoy walking in the small streets and flowered squares, visiting churches and the amazing Piazza San Marco, and vaporetting to the Murano island. A wonderful day.

The “Matinées de Microbiologie Moléculaire” meeting (3M) was organized in Gosselies on 27 and 28 January. Young PhD students and postdocs of the “Molecular microbiology” group of IBMM gave excellent presentations, including Elie Saliba (who talked about the role of arrestins in Gap1 permease endocytosis) and Melody Cools (who presented data on characterization of novel yeast vacuolar transporters) from our lab.

Excellent news for Céline Barthélemy, who was informed by the FNRS that she obtained a fellowship from the FRIA. Céline thus joins the lab as a PhD student and will pursue the work she initiated during her master thesis about the intracellular trafic of LAT1, a human amino acid transporter overexpressed in cancer cells. Congratulations to Céline !

B. André attended the “Vesicular traffic” one-day conference, November 19th, organized at Collège de France of Paris, where James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof, the 2013 laureates of the Physiology and Medicine Nobel prize for their discoveries on the molecular and cellular principles of membrane traffic, presented the last results of their research. Other presentations by French colleagues also contributed to the top quality of this scientific event. What was particularly interesting is the 2nd part of Randy Schekman’s presentation about the scientific publication in top journals and the “Elife” journal concept as an alternative. All presentations are available on line.

Our last paper entitled “Substrate-induced ubiquitylation and endocytosis of yeast amino acid permeases” has been accepted for publication in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology. This work, carried out in collaboration with Martine Prévost and Eva Krammer (ULB), reports that substrate binding to the yeast amino acid transporters Gap1 and Can1 triggers a conformational change eliciting their recognition by arrestin-like adaptors which in turn provokes their ubiquitylation by the Rsp5 ubiquitin ligase and their endocytosis. Similar mechanisms likely control many other plasma membrane secondary transporters according to the external concentration of their substrates.