Decoding cellular quality control mechanisms through evolutionary cell biology

Cellular quality control pathways, such as autophagy, are crucial for maintaining protein and organelle integrity, ensuring proper cellular function and survival. These mechanisms detect and eliminate misfolded or damaged components to prevent toxicity, and their dysregulation is linked to aging and diseases like neurodegeneration and cancer. Despite their established role in stress tolerance, the molecular underpinnings of autophagy-mediated quality control in plants remain poorly understood. Our lab employs evolutionary cell biology approaches to uncover and characterize these pathways. In this talk, I will summarize our efforts on autophagy pathway discovery and illustrate how comparative cell biology led to fundamental cross-kingdom conserved discoveries on cellular quality control.