May 7th at 1 pm, don’t miss Reto Gassmann’s “Connecting the Motors: How Adaptor Proteins Control Microtubule-Based Transport” at the A0.03 auditorium in UMinho’s School of Medicine.

Reto Gassmann studied biochemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and carried out PhD research at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology in Edinburgh with Bill Earnshaw, focusing on mitotic chromosome segregation. After postdoctoral work with Arshad Desai at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in San Diego, where he studied interactions between mitotic spindle microtubules and chromosomes, he joined IBMC (now i3S) in 2012 as a principal investigator. His group investigates how the activities of the opposing microtubule motors dynein and kinesin are coordinated by cargo adaptor proteins. They use a multidisciplinary approach combining live-cell fluorescence microscopy, genome editing in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans and cultured human cells, and biochemical reconstitution of molecular interactions. Beyond uncovering fundamental mechanisms of intracellular transport, this work aims to illuminate disease mechanisms associated with defective motor regulation.