Achievement

The trafficking of endomembranes within cells relies on a complex and dynamic network of vesicles. To understand this network, UC Riverside’s ChemGen IGERT fellow Michelle Brown, Professor Natasha Raikhel, and their international collaborators performed a high-content intracellular screen to discover small molecules that perturb endomembrane trafficking in the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. Thousands of molecules were prescreened and a selected subset was interrogated against a panel of fluorescent endomembrane compartment markers to identify molecules that altered vesicle trafficking. Blending imaging and computation, a marker-by-phenotype-by-treatment time matrix revealed groups of molecules that induced similar subcellular effects. This enabled dissection of recycling at the plasma membrane, vacuolar sorting, and cell-plate maturation. Bioactivity of compounds in human cells indicated that screens in plants can identify small molecules that are active in diverse organisms.