Molecular Mechanisms of Intracellular Trafficking

Intracellular trafficking distributes newly synthesized and endocytosed material to diverse cellular destinations and, by doing so, ensures cellular homeostasis. The functionality of the secretory trafficking and endocytosis are regulated in a highly complex manner with hundreds of molecular machineries and multiple pathways acting simultaneously. A precise coordination of transport carriers’ formation, directionality of their movement, fusion to the acceptor membranes and the morphology of intracellular organelles is tightly regulated in a temporal and spatial manner. Trafficking is also closely linked to multitude of other cellular processes: autophagy, cell death, regulation of transcription and translation. Deregulation of cargo trafficking leads to ever-increasing list of such diseases as cancer, cardio-vascular or neurodegenerative ones. Regulation of trafficking as a cellular response function to changes in the surrounding is little understood, and I am especially interested to understand this relation in detail.

To dissect the complexity of trafficking and signalling pathways, we use fluorescent microscopy-based assays, cell biology and biochemistry techniques to identify novel intracellular and extracellular regulators, inter-connections among them. We modify gene, transcript and protein expression function by geneediting, RNA interference and antibody-mediated approaches, respectively. We develop techniques to perform these experiments in highresolution and on a largescale, thereby, extracting high-content information from varying biological scales.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

1. Grigaitis, P., Starkuviene, V., Rost, U., Serva, A., Pucholt, P., Kummer, U. miRNA target identification and prediction as a function of time in gene expression data. RNA Biology. 2020, Apr 22: 1–11.
2. Liu., S. J., Majeed, W., Grigaitis, P., Betts, M. J., Climer, L. K., Starkuviene, V., Storrie., B. Epistatic analysis of the contribution of rabs and kifs to CATCHR family dependent Golgi organization. * Front Cell Dev Bio. 2019, Aug 2,7: 126.
3. Starkuviene, V., Kallenberger, S. M., Beil, N., Lisauskas, T., Schumacher, B. S., Bulkescher, R., Wajda, P., Gunkel, M., Beneke, J., Erfle, H. High-density cell arrays for genome-scale phenotypic screening. SLAS Discov. 2019 Mar, 24(3): 274–283.
4. Bulkescher, R., Starkuviene, V., & Erfle, H. Solid-phase reverse transfection for intracellular delivery of functionally active proteins. Genome Res. 2017 Oct, 27(10): 1752–1758.
5. Gunkel, M., Erfle, H., & Starkuviene, V. High-content analysis of the Golgi complex by correlative screening microscopy. Methods Mol Biol. 2016, 111–121.