Call for papers - Phase separation in homeostasis and disease

Valeria Levi, PhD, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Dr Levi received her PhD in Chemistry in Argentina and moved to the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics (University of Illinois, USA) where she specialized in advanced fluorescence microscopy methods and their applications to cell biology questions. She is now an Associate Professor and Principal Researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. The research interests of Dr Levi's group are the mechanisms of intracellular organization and their consequences to cell function. In the last years, her group has focused on the organization and dynamics of transcription and, more specifically, the functional relevance of transcriptional condensates in different cellular contexts.

Yi Lin, PhD, School of Life Sciences, IDG/McGovern Brain Institute for Brain Research, Center for Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, China

Dr Yi Lin obtained her PhD from Marquette University, USA. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University. She also serves as a principal investigator at IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Center for Life Sciences at Tsinghua University. Yi’s research focuses on the phase separation of biomacromolecules, investigating the molecular mechanisms and their physiological functions in the nervous system. She also explores the implication of abnormal phase separation in neurodegenerative diseases. The ultimate goal of Yi’s research is to understand the molecular details of phase separation and develop therapeutic approaches by intervening in pathological phase transitions.

Dragomir Milovanovic, PhD, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Germany

The focus of the Milovanovic Lab is to investigate condensate-to-membrane interactions in neuronal physiology and cellular pathology of neurodegenerative diseases. Using synaptic vesicle (SV) condensates as an example of condensates packed with small vesicles (Milovanovic et al., Science 2018, Sansevrino et al., Trend Neurosci, 2023), Drago's team was able to demonstrate that SV condensates act as reaction centers for sequestering α-synuclein (Hoffmann et al., J Mol Biol, 2021), a highly abundant synaptic protein implicated in the pathology of Parkinson’s Disease and related synucleinopathies. For investigating the association of condensates with membrane-bound organelles, the lab proposed a new framework of dipping contacts (Hoffmann & Milovanovic, J Cell Sci, 2023). Drago's team further established advanced reconstitution tools and single-molecule tracking in living neurons (Hoffmann et al., Nature Comm, 2023). The lab recently discovered that synaptic condensates can harbor electric potential at their interface, suggesting a new function of biomolecular condensates (Hoffmann et al., Nano Lett, 2023). In a different line of research, Drago's team is investigating how the metabolism affects the recognition and uptake of protein-lipid inclusions by microglia, cells that surveil the brain assuring neuronal homeostasis.

Emily Mitchell Sontag, PhD, Marquette University, USA

Dr Sontag is an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at Marquette University, Wisconsin, USA. She earned a PhD in Biological Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine under Dr Leslie Thompson. She then completed her postdoctoral training with Dr Judith Frydman at Stanford University. She works to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying cellular stress responses to misfolded proteins and their role in disease. Misfolded proteins are spatially sequestered into biomolecular condensates, but the function of condensate formation in proteostasis is unclear. Her research group uses yeast and mammalian cell models to better understand the role of biomolecular condensates in the toxicity and clearance of misfolded proteins.