Resolving Bax-Drp1 interactions during apoptosis published in EMBOJ!

Posted byjasonleelabPosted inLab News

January 13, 2022 – Ana Garcia-Saez and team published a beautiful story showing physical interactions between Bax and Drp1 on mitochondrial membranes during apoptosis. This interaction plays a critical role in mediating the release of cytochrome C into the cytoplasm to potentiate the cell death cascade. Jason’s development of the dimerization dependent fluorescent biosensors (ddFBs) to resolve endoplasmic reticulum and processing (P)-body contact sites overlapped with Raquel Salvador-Gallego’s (Ana’s PhD student) time in the Voeltz Lab. Our collaboration fostered the use of ddFBs in the spatiotemporal resolution of Bax and Drp1 interactions on mitochondrial membranes upon the initiation of cell death. Check it out at EMBOJ!

Figure 1E from Jenner et al. EMBOJ (2022) of HeLa cells expressing RA-Bax, GB-Drp1, MitoBFP. The interactions between Bax and Drp1 are pseudocolored in green. The general mitochondrial marker is pseudocolored in magenta. Experiments above were conducted by Raquel Salvador-Gallego.