This project is designed to build upon work I have done as a postdoctoral scholar, to follow exciting leads opened up by the discovery of a new mechanism cells employ to recover from stress, and expand these studies into new areas that I will study as an independent investigator. My goals are draw upon the substantial resources and expertise at UCSF that will allow me to learn new techniques and expand my research, and in the longer term to develop my own research program focused on mRNA regulation and its relationship to localization and recovery from stress. As a postdoc in Jonathan Weissman's laboratory at UCSF, I have initially characterized a new pathway by which cells degrade mRNAs localized to the endoplasmic reticulum as a way of coping with folding stress in this compartment. There are many physiological and mechanistic aspects of this pathway that are unexplored and are likely to provide insight into how cells survive acute stress, how a specific endonuclease participates in the decay of a broad spectrum of mRNAs, and how localization affects mRNA stability and regulation. The research described in this application is designed to address each of these issues directly, using a combination of genomic and smaller scale experiments. The research outlined here will further our understanding of how cells survive and adapt to stress in the ER, a condition that has been linked to a variety of human diseases, including diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, as well as viral infection. Understanding how cells cope with this situation will have direct relevance to our understanding of the mechanisms of these diseases. For example, the relationship between obesity and type 2 diabetes has been proposed to be mediated by ER stress and in particular Ire1, a protein whose function will be directly investigated in this study.
