Presentation Information
[PT07-01]Regulatory and Evolutionary Landscape of Eukaryotic Vesicle Traffic
*Mukund Thattai1 (1. Simons Centre for the Study of Living Machines, National Centre for Biological Sciences (India))
Keywords:
Cell Biology
Eukaryotic cells are defined by their membrane traffic systems: transport vesicles move cargo between membrane-bounded compartments such as the ER, Golgi, and plasma membrane. This system allows eukaryotes to sample their environment, change shape, and communicate by contact, traits that are essential for organised sexual reproduction and multicellularity. Understanding the origins of compartmentalised membrane traffic is therefore key to understanding eukaryote evolution. The loading of cargo into budding vesicles, and the fusion of these vesicles to target compartments, is regulated by modules of interacting proteins such as coats, cargo adaptors, and fusogenic SNARE proteins. The system is self-organised, because the resulting flux of cargo determines the composition of each compartment. We explore a rule-based multilevel model of vesicle traffic involving three layers: evolutionary (genes), regulatory (protein interactions), and phenotypic (cargo transport graph). We use this framework to ask the following questions: How is the membrane traffic system assembled through dynamic protein interactions and information flow? How did it get this way over billions of years of evolution? How does it benefit the cell to have such a system? By bringing together threads from biology, physics and computer science, we can weave the story of the past, present and future of cellular life.