Eleanor Balgley
Pronouns: She/her/hers
Research Mentor(s): Xiaoqiong Wei
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: MIP / Medicine
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Oral5
Session: Session 6 – 4:40pm – 5:30 pm
Room: Breakout room 5
Authors: Eleanor Balgley, Xiaoqiong Wei
Presenter: 5
Abstract
Podocytes are specialized epithelial cells located in the kidney glomerulus, a twisted globe of capillaries through which the blood is filtered. Since podocytes are terminally differentiated cells, it is critical for podocytes to deal with cellular stress caused by accumulated misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to avoid cellular injury and death. Endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-associated degradation (ERAD) and autophagy are two major protein quality-control machineries to deal with cellular stress. However, the crosstalk between these two quality-control systems has not yet been investigated in podocyte function. To test our hypothesis that Sel1L-Hrd1 ERAD plays a critical role in podocytes by coordinating the activation of autophagy, we generated Sel1L-Atg7 double knock out mice which lacks Sel1L-Hrd1 ERAD and Atg7-dependent autophagy. Mouse genotyping was operated by collecting mouse ear tissue, extracting DNA, running PCR and DNA gel. Mouse growth and survival were monitored 3 times per week. Mouse urine was collected at 3, 5, and 7 weeks of age. The concentrations of urine creatinine and albumin were determined by ELISA. Our preliminary data showed double knock out mice develop proteinuria at ~3 weeks of age and die prematurely with a median life span of ~6 weeks. Next we will study whether the nephrin, an important slit diaphragm protein, is the key factor to affect the phenotype of the double knock out mice.
Biomedical Sciences
