Abstract:
Selective autophagy is a fundamental protein quality control pathway that safeguards proteostasis by degrading damaged or surplus cellular components, particularly under stress. This process is orchestrated by selective autophagy receptors (SARs) that direct specific cargo for degradation. While significant strides have been made in understanding the molecular framework of selective autophagy, the diversity of SAR repertoires across species remains largely unexplored. In this talk, I will present our recent findings where we employed comparative approached that led to the discovery of new autophagy mechanism in plants and humans.

Bio:
Yasin Dagdas studied BSc in Molecular Biology & Genetics and MSc in Biotechnology at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. In 2009, he moved to the UK to join the lab of Nicholas Talbot for his PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Exeter. There, he studied the role of cellular morphogenesis in the pathogenicity of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae. From 2013 - 2016 Yasin did his postdoctoral training with Sophien Kamoun at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, where he discovered how a plant pathogen effector has evolved to antagonize a host autophagy cargo receptor. In 2017, he became a group leader at the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology in Vienna. His research focuses on autophagy-mediated cellular quality control mechanisms in plants.