REPU Magazine 2017 | Page 22

REPU MAGAZINE N 3 News 2017 An interview with Nicholas Ingolia Professor at UC Berkeley Lidia Llacsahuanga, REPUBiology 2017, sat down with her Principal Investigator, Nicholas Ingolia, to share her research and some thoughts about the REPU program. What kind of research do you do in your laboratory? of that: an opportunity to really see how we do science. So yeah, I think it's really great. We are broadly interested in understanding the translational control of gene expression. So, why is it that some RNAs are translated better than others, and why some RNAs are translated much better in some conditions and not well at all in others. What is your overall opinion on Lidia's performance and would you be willing to recommend the program? Yeah! It's really been a pleasure to have Lidia here. I think that she has made some real progress in a project that has been going on in the lab, something that is really a pretty central interest of ours and that we've been working on for a while. She's really moved that forward and it's been great to have her around to interact with students and postdocs in the lab. She's really brought a lot to the lab too. It's been great to have her. We use a variety of techniques to measure and perturb translation. One particular challenge we run into is that many of the core proteins that are involved in translation initiation are essential; so we are not able to knock them out. And even if we deplete them, it is very quickly toxic to cells. So one of the things we really wanted to do is a better genetic approach to very rapidly deplete some of these core proteins, so we can look at the immediate effects of their depletion. That will give us a better understanding of what they are normally doing in the cell during translation. And that's something we've been working on this spring: a way to very rapidly deplete these proteins. This is sort of co-opting a system that plants use to rapidly degrade certain proteins in response to plant hormones. So we can transplant that whole system into budding yeast, which is one of our favorite model organisms to work with. Then, in yeast, we can rapidly target some of these proteins, like the cap-binding protein, and target that for rapid degradation, which lets us see what happens to cells when that protein goes away quickly. What do you think of the REPU program? Figure 1. Ingolia’s Group with Lidia Llacsahuanga I think it's a wonderful program! Certainly, from my perspective, it was great to have Lidia here visiting in the lab. I know that she got to work very closely with an experienced postdoc. I know that he really enjoyed that opportunity. And I think that she really got a lot out 22