Whew, what a whirlwind of a conference! We enjoyed hearing about the latest exciting cell biology from the comfort of our couches at Cell Bio Virtual 2020. Greg gave a talk in the session on Organelle Cross talk and Contact Sites, while Amit and Ian presented posters. Sarah hosted a fruitful Round Table Discussion on lipid droplets. We hope to see our colleagues in person next year!

A warm welcome to BBSP rotation student Cat Lewis. Cat will be working with Shannon to test and develop fluorescent reporters for studying organelle contact sites.

Congratulations to collaborators Emily Harrison and Chad Pecot for publishing their beautiful story in Cancer Research: “A circle RNA regulatory axis promotes lung squamous metastasis via CDR1-mediated regulation of Golgi trafficking”. Ian Windham contributed live-cell imaging data showing that CDR1 affects the rate of ER-to-Golgi trafficking. Read it here.

Huge congrats to PhD student Ian Windham and postdoc Greg Miner for being awarded an NIH F31 and F32, respectively! Ian will study  the trafficking of ApoE in astrocytes. Greg will investigate the mechanism and function of lipid droplet-mitochondria contact sites mediated by Perilipin 5. We are looking forward to continuing these exciting projects!

A warm welcome to BBSP rotation student Morrent Thang! Morrent will use multispectral imaging to investigate organelle morphology and dynamics in an astrocyte model of Alexander disease.

Together with our colleagues in the Deshmukh Lab, we are honored to have been selected to join the CZI Neurodegeneration Challenge Network. We will develop a platform for simultaneous, dynamic imaging of up to eight organelles in multiple cell types derived from induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines. This will allow us to explore the contributions of specific genes, genotypes, and organelle dynamics to various forms of neurodegeneration.

You can read more about our project here, and about the Collaborative Pairs funding mechanism here.

We very much enjoyed attending the FASEB Lipid Droplets Virtual conference. Sarah gave a talk and Greg presented a poster. We look forward to seeing everyone in person again in 2022!

We are ramping up bench work after being closed since mid-March. We used the time to read, think, and plan out our experiments, so we are excited to put our plans into action!

We are pleased to announce that Neurobiology curriculum PhD student Shannon Rhoads will join both the S. Cohen and T. Cohen labs (https://tcohenlab.web.unc.edu). She will use cutting-edge microscopy to study organelle function in models of ALS. Welcome Shannon!

A warm welcome to BBSP rotation students Reggie Edwards and Allie Skinkle! Reggie will be studying the effect of lipid droplet-mitochondria tethering on the dynamics of both organelles. Allie will be using multispectral imaging to investigate changes in organelle organization during differentiation and in Alexander Disease.