Leveraging evolutionary diversity to discover new autophagy pathways in plants and humans

Yasin Dagdas (Gregor Mendel Inst. of Molecular Plant Biology): To perform optimally despite fluctuating intrinsic demands and extrinsic stressors, plant cells remodel their proteome and organelles. Although the gene regulatory networks that are induced during development and stress are extensively studied, how quality control mechanisms execute rapid cellular reprogramming remain poorly understood. The BBQ (Big Biological Question) of our research program is to understand how selective au-tophagy renovates and remodels plant cells to cope with stress. Selective autophagy is an intracellular immune system that involves the recognition of nonself-labelled cargo by modular receptor proteins and their subsequent delivery to the vacuole for recycling. Unlike metazoans, the cargo receptor inventory remains incomplete in plants. We aim to discover new cargo receptors and understand how they are integrated with stress signal-ling pathways. In this talk, I will highlight our recent progress on receptor identification and characterization using comparative approaches.