主讲嘉宾

Hagai Abeliovich，希伯来大学生物化学、食品科学与营养学院副教授，线粒体自噬研究领域权威学者

主讲人简介

Prof. Hagai Abeliovich, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A leading expert in mitochondrial autophagy (mitophagy), his pioneering research has been published in high-impact journals including Nature Communications and PNAS, garnering over 13,600 citations. He holds the prestigious Nordmann Fellowship (2023) and has been recognized with numerous awards throughout his career. Prof. Abeliovich actively shapes his field as the Mitophagy Section Editor for the journal Autophagy and as the organizer of the 2021 EMBO Workshop on Mitochondrial Homeostasis and Human Disease. His leadership extends to academia, having served as Head of the Graduate Program in Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition at his university. He currently leads a robust research program supported by grants from the Israel Science Fund and the NSF-BSF.

讲座摘要

Mitophagy, or the autophagic degradation of mitochondria, is an important housekeeping function of eukaryotic cells that prevents the accumulation of defective mitochondria due to oxidative damage and spontaneous mutations. The culling of defective mitochondria has been suggested to delay the onset of aging symptoms, and defects in mitophagy have been linked to late onset hereditary disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and type II diabetes. We previously showed that different mitochondrial matrix proteins undergo mitophagy at different rates. An attractive model, supported by existing data, is that fission and fusion of mitochondria are linked to the segregation of defective mitochondrial compartments from undamaged ones, in a ‘distillation’ mechanism that leads to the selective turnover of defective compartments. We now demonstrate that dynamic mitochondrial matrix protein phosphorylation and dephosphorylation generate a segregation principle that would couple with mitochondrial fission and fusion to generate such a distillation process. Our data support a model wherein differences in protein-protein interactions between differentially phosphorylated proteins of the same species can drive a microscopic phase separation which, coupled with fusion-fission dynamics, may account for the observed selectivity.