Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2021
Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster V44
Höfundar / Authors: Þengill Fannar Jónsson, Margrét Helga Ögmundsdóttir
Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: Háskóli Íslands, Heilbrigðisvísindasvið, Læknadeild
Kynnir / Presenter: Þengill Fannar Jónsson
Autophagy is an essential degradation pathway, conserved in all eukaryotes. It aids in maintaining cellular homeostasis by facilitating the turnover of various cellular components and foreign bodies. During autophagy, membrane structures, called autophagosomes expand from cellular membrane structures such as the endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi apparatus. During its expansion, the autophagosome engulfs cytosolic materials in a selective and nonselective way. The autophagosome ultimately fuses with a lysosome and becomes an autolysosome in which the autophagosomal cargo is degraded. We recently discovered two uncharacterized isoforms of GABARAP, a member of the autophagy essential, ATG8 gene family. Both isoforms are lacking exons present in the characterized isoform. In our analysis we looked at RNA sequencing data from the TARGET, GTEx, and TCGA databases and discovered that the presence of the two uncharacterized GABARAP isoforms exceeds that of the characterized one in all available tissue samples. We have been able to express the characterized, and importantly one of the uncharacterized protein isoforms in a human cell line. Consequently, it will be important to investigate the effect of the uncharacterized protein isoform to determine its possible role, especially considering how prevalent its expression is in both healthy and diseased tissues.