Notice Board

The Alberta RNA Research and Training Institute Presents:Dr. George Owttrim

Department of Biological Sciences

University of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

"Conditional proteolysis as a regulator of gene expression: Does cold stress regulate heat stress?”

An ARRTI Speaker Series Lecture

Tuesday, June 30th, 2015

3:00pm - 4:00pm

C640 (University Hall)

All are welcome!

Abstract:

The ability of free-living microorganisms to sense and respond to abiotic changes in their environment is crucial for survival. Expression of the sole DEAD box RNA helicase, crhR, in the photosynthetic bacterium Synechocystis PCC 6803 is regulated at a minimum of three autoregulatory, CrhR-dependent and three CrhR-independent checkpoints in response to temperature stress. This implies that the rearrangement of RNA secondary structure is required for cellular response to this stress. One of the checkpoints involves the autoregulatory, CrhR-dependent conditional proteolysis of CrhR in response to temperature upshift from 20 to 30oC. A whole cell proteome time course (Richard Fahlman) has identified proteins whose abundance is altered in response to the temperature upshift in a CrhR-dependent fashion. Potentially not unexpectedly, affected  proteins are associated with translation and photosynthesis. Unexpectedly, our data suggests that the cold shock protein CrhR functions in a Synechocystis heat shock response. Conditional proteolysis is a much faster way to shut down a biosynthetic pathway that traditional transcription-translation regulatory networks. In the future, we hope to utilize the conditional proteolysis system to rapidly and precisely regulate biosynthetic pathway activity for biotechnological applications.

About Dr. Owttrim:

Dr. George Owttrim is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta. George received BSc (Honours) and MSc degrees from York University in Ontario in 1983, and hid PhD in Botany from the University of Toronto in 1989. He was an NSERC and a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bern Switzerland (1989-1994) before joining the University of Alberta as an Associate Professor in 1994. Our research program utilizes a range of molecular, genetic, and biochemical techniques to investigate how the rearrangement of RNA secondary structure affects gene expression in response to environmental stress.

The Alberta RNA Research and Training Institute (ARRTI) and the ARRTI Speaker Series are supported by Alberta Innovates Technology Futures.