The School of Life Sciences Peter Garland Lecture 2022: How cells export proteins and RNA

Hosts: Professor Claire Halpin FRSE FRSB and Professor Dario Alessi FRS FRSE FMedSci

Event speaker: Professor Randy Schekman

Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Professor Randy Wayne Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof for their ground-breaking work on the machinery regulating eukaryotic vesicle trafficking. Basic principles from Schekman's studies in yeast are now being applied to biochemical analysis of vesicle traffic in mammalian and human cells and to investigation of genetic diseases of protein transport. His current research explores the pathways of collagen secretion, autophagosome formation, and examples of unconventional secretion such as the biogenesis of extracellular vesicles containing small RNAs (exosomes), and the secretion of alpha synuclein, a protein implicated in Parkinson’s Disease. 

Professor Schekman is a Howard Hughes Institute Investigator and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992 and has been honoured with many awards and prizes including the Gairdner International Award and the Lasker Award (with James Rothman). He was founding editor-in-chief of eLife and former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology.

About the lecture series

The Peter Garland Lecture was set up in 1985 to mark the achievement of Dundee’s first Professor of Biochemistry in building up the Department into one of the strongest in the UK over the period 1970 to 1984.  Fifteen Peter Garland lecturers have had, or subsequently went on to win, a Nobel Prize.