Achievement

IGERT-Lifechips trainee Silvia Cermelli conducted research on lipid droplets. She studies active transport of droplets and protein sequestration, its regulation, and function. The lipid droplet transport in Drosophila embryos at early stages of development is a well established model system to study molecular motor-based transport. The droplet system allows a unique combination of biophysical, biochemical and genetic approaches to investigate microtubule-based transport in vivo. Silvia recently discovers that lipid droplets in early Drosophila embryos sequester large amounts of histone proteins commonly thought to reside exclusively in the nuclei. She’s been working with her co-advisor Lan Huang who is also a Lifechips faculty member and she’s been applying mass spectrometry procedures to better understand how histones are recruited to lipid droplets through the identification of molecular signatures of sequestration.