Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley
Host: Marko Jovanovic
Title: Regulated transcript toggling and protein degradation set meiotic protein levels
Abstract: As a cell progress through meiosis, it undergoes numerous unidirectional stages, resulting in diverse changes to cellular structures and functions, including restructuring of all organelles and two rounds of chromosome segregation. Because the molecular basis for most of these changes remains mysterious, my lab has focused on identifying the gene expression regulation that underlies meiotic differentiation, using budding yeast as a model system. We recently collected parallel mRNA-seq, ribosome profiling, and quantitative mass spectrometry measurements through meiosis and the deep resultant dataset provided surprisingly broad insights into the types of gene regulation that occur during developmental programs. For example, we found that hundreds of genes showed mRNA level patterns over time that anti-correlated with protein level patterns. This was the result of an unconventional mode of gene regulation, based on timed mRNA toggling over time that we also found to be used during yeast stress responses and in human ES cell differentiation. Our dataset also shed new light on a long-standing question about the regulation of protein complex components.