Super-resolution imaging of intracellular transport

Intracellular transport takes place in the crowded, complex environment of a cell. To capture this complexity and understand how the microtubule cytoskeleton and motor proteins collectively regulate the transport of organelles like lysosomes, we have been employing a combination of live cell imaging and super-resolution microscopy. I will present our results on how microtubule post-translational modifications, in particular detyrosination, regulate the transport and fusion of lysosomes with autophagosomes. In addition, I will present our work that combines multi-color super-resolution microscopy, single molecule tracking and modelling to study how cells build up and maintain a small subpopulation of microtubules that are highly enriched in detyrosination and how detyrosination propagates along the microtubule lattice.