Michal Linial

Professor Michal Linial
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Lecture

Not all proteins are born alike: Evolution solutions in translational control

Protein synthesis is an indispensable process which accounts for a large proportion of the energetic resources of any living cells. Therefore, translational regulation must be tightly controlled. Such regulation is critical for protein biogenesis, folding, trafficking and degradation under stable and changing conditions. I will focus on the importance of hidden evolutionary signatures within the coding region of proteins that govern translational efficiency and dominate proteostasis in health and disease. I will discuss the notion of tRNA adaptation index (tAI) as an indirect measure for translation elongation efficiency. Specifically, I will show that proteins which must be localized to specific sites and organelles in cells evolved to support their optimal translation elongation rate. A link between an evolutionary signature within mRNAs and efficient management of protein production will be illustrated for the case of synaptic proteins and their family members. Neuronal communication is governed by the coordinated action of the synapse. In all organisms having a nerve system, the synapses are signified by the abundance of ion channels, cytoskeletal elements, ligand binding receptors, and secreted proteins. As such, the proteins composition is a showcase for an extreme demand of translational control. In the last part of the talk, I will extend the concept of translation regulation by illustrating the robustness of the translational machinery in view of post-translational regulation of miRNA in cells. I will present COMICS as a simulator that predict the global cell response to miRNA alterations, and illustrate the immunity of the translation apparatus to miRNA fluctuations. In summary, I will show that evolutionarily conserved design principles while often hidden are strong determinant in the cell homeostasis in health and disease

Bio

Michal Linial is a Professor of Biochemistry and Bioinformatics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) and the Director of the Israeli Institute for Advance studies (IIAS) in Jerusalem (from 2012-2018). She served as the Director of the Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology at the Hebrew University and the head of Node for ELIXIR-IL.

Prof. Linial obtained her Ph.D. in Molecular biology (1986) from HUJI studying mechanistic aspects of replication in parasites. She then completed her post-doctoral training at Stanford, CA-USA, on the field of cellular neurochemistry. On 1989 she joined the faculty of HUJI in the Biological Chemistry department. She is a founder (imitated in 1999) and chair of the honor educational program for Computational Biology in HUJI. She is the representative of Israel in the pan-European project of ELIXIR. ML serves in the Board of Directors and as a Vice-President of the International Society of Computational Biology and was selected as a fellow of the society. From 2005 she serves at the steering committee of ISMB, RECOM and ECCB the flagship international conferences of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology communities. ML was a visiting professor in University of Washington in Seattle and Microsoft Research Center in Cambridge, MA-USA. ML has authored over 150 peer-reviewed papers and contributed to the development of bioinformatics databases and websites that are open to the large communities of the biomedical and Life science researchers. Her current research interests covers host-pathogen co-evolution, protein family evolution, microRNA mode of action in extreme cellular conditions and researching the molecular basis of aging and metabolic diseases. She applies large-scale technologies including next generation sequencing, genomics, GWAS, protein structure, mass spectrometry and evolution for revealing the different regulation levels cell in health and disease.

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Michal Linial

Lecture

Bio

BioSB 2019