The NIH recently announced that Assistant Professor of Biology Avital Rodal will be a recipient of the 2012 NIH Directors New Innovator Award. The award allows new, exceptionally creative and ambitious investigators to begin high impact research projects. Granted to early stage investigators, candidates are eligible for the award for up to ten years after the completion of their PhD or MD. The award emphasizes bold, new approaches, which have the potential to spur large scientific steps forward. This year’s award was made to fifty-one researchers, and provides each with 1.5 million dollars of direct research funding over five years.
The Rodal lab studies the mechanisms of membrane deformation and endosomal traffic in neurons as they relate to growth signaling and disease. Membrane deformation by a core set of conserved protein complexes leads to the creation of tubules and vesicles from the plasma membrane and internal compartments. Endocytic vesicles contain, among other cargoes, activated growth factors and receptors, which traffic to the neuronal cell body to drive transcriptional responses (see movie). These growth cues somehow coordinate with neuronal activity to dramatically alter the morphology of the neuron, and disruptions to both endocytic pathways and neuronal activity have been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Rodal hopes to determine how neuronal activity affects the in vivo function and biochemical composition of the membrane trafficking machinery, by examining the transport of fluorescently labeled growth factor receptors in chronically or acutely activated neurons at the Drosophila neuromuscular junction (NMJ). Her group will combine these live imaging studies with a proteomic analysis of endocytic machinery purified from hyper-activated and under-activated neurons. By investigating the interplay between neuronal activity, membrane deformation, and receptor localization in live animal NMJs, she hopes to gain a better understanding of the strategies that healthy neurons employ to regulate membrane trafficking events, and provide new insight into specific points of failure in neurodegenerative disease.
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Science at Brandeis 