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BACKUP - Biochemical Mechanisms of Selective AutophagyHHS Only

Air date: Friday, March 3, 2017, 12:00:00 PM
Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
Description: NCI’s Center for Cancer Research (CCR) Grand Rounds

Wade Harper is the Bert and Natalie Vallee Professor of Molecular Pathology and the Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology prior to post-doctoral studies in biological chemistry at Harvard Medical School. In 1988, he joined the faculty in the Department of Biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine before moving to Harvard Medical School in 2003. Awards include American Cancer Society Junior Faculty Award; the Michael DeBakey Award for Excellence in Research in 1994 and 2000 for the discovery of cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors and the SCF ubiquitin ligase; the Vallee Visiting Professorship; and the Javits Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Harper’s work focuses on the analysis of ubiquitin-driven signaling systems and the integration of quantitative proteomics and cell biology to understand the mechanism for the signaling systems . Initial work form his lab led to the discovery of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p21 which is the target of the p53 tumor suppressor and is required for G1 arrest in response to DNA damage. He co-discovered the Cullin-RING ubiquitin ligase (CRL) system – a major class of enzymes that control the stability of hundreds of cellular proteins, generally in a signal-dependent manner. His lab defined substrate adaptor families for several cullins and identified substrates for a wide array of CRLs involved in cell cycle control, transcription, innate immunity, and the DNA damage response. Dr. Harper’s recent work seeks to identify and quantify signaling networks using interaction proteomics, including networks involved in protein homeostasis and quality control. Moreover, his work seeks to employ quantitative proteomic approaches to understand signaling systems in vivo, including the integration of ubiquitin and phosphorylation, as demonstrated by the elucidation of a feed-forward mechanisms describing how the PINK1 kinase and the Parkin ubiquitin ligase promote mitochondrial ubiquitylation to promote mitophagy. Finally, work in the Harper lab seeks to understand the architecture of the human interactome through large-scale interaction proteomics.
Author: Wade Harper, Ph.D., Chair & Professor of Cell Biology, Bert and Natalie Vallee Professor of Molecular Pathology, Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School
Runtime: 1 hour