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GEE Seminar - Professor Joel Dacks, University of Alberta
22 March 2023, 12:00 pm–1:00 pm
Title: 'Unexpected components and ancient origins of the eukaryotic membrane-trafficking system'
Event Information
Open to
- UCL staff | UCL students | UCL alumni
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Amy Godfrey
Location
-
G08Roberts Building---
Academic Host: Andrew Pomiankowski
Abstract: Eukaryogenesis was an immense evolutionary transition, setting the stage for all of complex life that we see today. Evolving the organelles and machinery of the membrane-trafficking system would have been a crucial milestone in this process, as these components would have enabled key eukaryotic functions in the proto-eukaryote, as they do in modern organisms. And yet the cellular understanding of membrane-trafficking is based largely on animal and fungal models, with the diversity of endomembrane systems being under-explored. I will discuss comparative molecular evolutionary analyses that confirm many, but not all, aspects of this model as being widespread, conserved, and ancient, present in the eukaryotic ancestor ~1.5 billion years ago. Surprisingly, however, this includes components present in taxonomically diverse eukaryotes, but absent from animals and fungi, which I will argue is important to understanding cell biology of environmentally and medically important microbes. Delving further back in evolution, I will also present data that the Arf super-family of GTPases, key components for vesicle formation and linking with the cytoskeleton, is derived from Asgardarchae, sharing not only origin but biochemical mechanism as well. These data strongly indicate that the functional foundations of membrane-trafficking were already present in the archaea contributor to eukaryogenesis.
About the Speaker
Professor Joel Dacks
at University of Alberta
I am currently an Honorary Professor in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, linked with the Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution. My main academic position is at the University of Alberta, where my research group studies evolutionary cell biology of the membrane-trafficking system and how this pertains to both existing cellular diversity and eukaryotic origins. We emphasize microbial eukaryotes (i.e. protists) as critical sampling points to tackle both molecular evolutionary and cell biological questions. I have served as the President of the International Society for Evolutionary Protistology (2018-2020) and as the Treasurer for the International Society of Protistologists (ISOP) since 2018. In 2016, I was the recipient of ISOP’s Seymour Hutner Award and I have been the Canada Research Chair in Evolution Cell Biology since 2011.
Before starting my own research group in 2008, I was a Research Fellow in the Pathology Department at Cambridge University with Professor Mark Field where we proposed the ‘Organelle Paralogy Hypothesis’ for non-endosymbiotic origins of eukaryotic organelles. I received my PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Dalhousie University (Canada) in 2003 under the supervision of Professor W. Ford Doolittle.