基本信息
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职业迁徙
个人简介
Awards
HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholar[18]
Bjorkman-Strominger-Wiley Prize for Collaboration[19]
American Society for Cell Biology WICB Junior Award for Excellence in Research[20]
Young Mentor Award, Harvard Medical School[21]
Armenise-Harvard Foundation Junior Faculty Grant[22]
Rita Allen Milton Cassel Scholar[23]
NIH Director's New Innovator Award[24]
Once Samara Reck-Peterson was introduced to molecular motors, nothing could keep her from figuring out how they work.
In her lab at the University of California, San Diego, Reck-Peterson studies dynein, one of two families of proteins that move cellular components along microtubules, the cell’s internal highways. Dynein and its counterpart, the kinesin family, keep the interior of cells orderly and functional, ensuring that hundreds of molecules and organelles arrive where they need to go. That’s critical for human health, as many neurological disorders result when cellular cargoes get waylaid. And there are plenty of ways things can go wrong, because moving an organelle or a sac of neurotransmitters across a cell entails multiple steps. Reck-Peterson wants to understand them all.
In some ways, Reck-Peterson says, it’s surprising that she’s become so engrossed in cell biology, because her rural Minnesota high school didn’t offer much science. But her parents encouraged her curiosity, and once she got to Carleton College, she seized the opportunity to work in a biology lab and was hooked. “I got to experience trying to discover something new, and I just wanted to keep doing that,” she says.
Her fascination with molecular motors started when she took a physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts during her first year as a graduate student. This transformative experience led to a PhD in cell biology from Yale University, studying the motor protein myosin.
When she then moved on to the University of California, San Francisco lab of HHMI Investigator Ronald Vale to study dynein, little was known about how that motor worked. Together with fellow postdoc Andrew Carter, she developed methods to make and purify variants of dynein from yeast cells. Suddenly, rigorous studies of dynein’s structure and function became possible.
By watching dynein in action, Reck-Peterson has worked out how it moves step by step along microtubules. She’s witnessed the tug-of-war between dynein and kinesin as they move cargo in opposing directions along a microtubule track and discovered that some cellular materials hitch a ride on other cargo rather than interacting with the motors themselves. She’s also found that a protein whose absence interferes with brain development can both speed up and slow down dynein’s progress along its tracks.
Still, Reck-Peterson wants to know more. How do cargoes get loaded onto the dynein motor? How is delivery of each package to the right place in the cell ensured? And how does dynein, which moves in only one direction, release its cargo and return to the start of its track to begin again?
She’s confident that she and her team will find the answers. She’s taken care to cultivate a highly collaborative atmosphere among the physicists and biologists in her lab. “It’s a really fun way to do science and it allows us to take a wide array of approaches and address almost any question we want to,” she says.
HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholar[18]
Bjorkman-Strominger-Wiley Prize for Collaboration[19]
American Society for Cell Biology WICB Junior Award for Excellence in Research[20]
Young Mentor Award, Harvard Medical School[21]
Armenise-Harvard Foundation Junior Faculty Grant[22]
Rita Allen Milton Cassel Scholar[23]
NIH Director's New Innovator Award[24]
Once Samara Reck-Peterson was introduced to molecular motors, nothing could keep her from figuring out how they work.
In her lab at the University of California, San Diego, Reck-Peterson studies dynein, one of two families of proteins that move cellular components along microtubules, the cell’s internal highways. Dynein and its counterpart, the kinesin family, keep the interior of cells orderly and functional, ensuring that hundreds of molecules and organelles arrive where they need to go. That’s critical for human health, as many neurological disorders result when cellular cargoes get waylaid. And there are plenty of ways things can go wrong, because moving an organelle or a sac of neurotransmitters across a cell entails multiple steps. Reck-Peterson wants to understand them all.
In some ways, Reck-Peterson says, it’s surprising that she’s become so engrossed in cell biology, because her rural Minnesota high school didn’t offer much science. But her parents encouraged her curiosity, and once she got to Carleton College, she seized the opportunity to work in a biology lab and was hooked. “I got to experience trying to discover something new, and I just wanted to keep doing that,” she says.
Her fascination with molecular motors started when she took a physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts during her first year as a graduate student. This transformative experience led to a PhD in cell biology from Yale University, studying the motor protein myosin.
When she then moved on to the University of California, San Francisco lab of HHMI Investigator Ronald Vale to study dynein, little was known about how that motor worked. Together with fellow postdoc Andrew Carter, she developed methods to make and purify variants of dynein from yeast cells. Suddenly, rigorous studies of dynein’s structure and function became possible.
By watching dynein in action, Reck-Peterson has worked out how it moves step by step along microtubules. She’s witnessed the tug-of-war between dynein and kinesin as they move cargo in opposing directions along a microtubule track and discovered that some cellular materials hitch a ride on other cargo rather than interacting with the motors themselves. She’s also found that a protein whose absence interferes with brain development can both speed up and slow down dynein’s progress along its tracks.
Still, Reck-Peterson wants to know more. How do cargoes get loaded onto the dynein motor? How is delivery of each package to the right place in the cell ensured? And how does dynein, which moves in only one direction, release its cargo and return to the start of its track to begin again?
She’s confident that she and her team will find the answers. She’s taken care to cultivate a highly collaborative atmosphere among the physicists and biologists in her lab. “It’s a really fun way to do science and it allows us to take a wide array of approaches and address almost any question we want to,” she says.
研究兴趣
论文共 111 篇作者统计合作学者相似作者
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Nature Chemical Biologyno. 4 (2024): 521-529
Biophysical journalno. 3S1 (2023): 315a-315A
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY OF THE CELLno. 7 (2023): br9-br9
Verena Dederer, Marta Sanz Murillo, Eva P Karasmanis, Kathryn S Hatch,Deep Chatterjee,Franziska Preuss, Kamal R Abdul Azeez,Landon Vu Nguyen,Christian Galicia,Birgit Dreier,Andreas Plückthun,Wim Versees,
biorxiv(2023)
Kavita J Rangan,Samara L Reck-Peterson
Biophysical journalno. 3S1 (2023): 544a-544A
EMPIAR dataset (2023)
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