| Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins |
Aaron Gitler: Into the Mind of YeastAugust 1, 2010, The Scientist Like most graduate students, Aaron Gitler started looking for a postdoc focusing on the topic of his graduate studies—developmental biology. But a random twist of fate brought Gitler to a talk by the Whitehead Institute’s Susan Lindquist, who lab researches protein misfolding—a common cause of neurodegenerative disease. “It really just blew me away,” he recalls. In Lindquist’s lab, he worked with yeast—a great model for studying development, but a rather “unusual” one for neurodegeneration, he says, because yeast cells lack brains. But because the mechanisms for dealing with misfolded proteins are largely conserved, yeast is turning out to be an accurate and efficient model of the basic biological pathways that cause human diseases characterized by protein misfolding. | Events
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 | © 2011, The Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins. All rights reserved. |
