Rice Institute for Biomedical Research
Department of Molecular Biosciences
Northwestern University
Lab News
The Morimoto lab wishes a fond farewell to Dr. Parul Mishra, Visiting Professor from the University of Hyderabad who has brightened our halls for the past year.
Parul received the highly competitive Long Term ICMR-DHR International Fellowship for Young Biomedical Scientist 2023-24 from the Indian Medical Research Council to work with our lab members to develop and realize new tools and approaches to enhance proteostasis to prevent protein misfolding and aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases.
We look forward to continued collaboration with Dr. Mishra.
Prof. Rick Morimoto strikes a pose with Prof. Stephanie Watowich (former Morimoto Lab Ph.D. student) and Stephanie's current Ph.D. student, Sarah Schneider, at the MD Anderson Cancer Institute in April 2025. Rick was in Texas to present a Science to Medicine seminar.
The Morimoto lab hosted the 30th Anniversary Midwest Stress Response and Molecule Chaperone Meeting on Saturday, January 18th in the Pancoe Abbott Auditorium on Northwestern's Evanston campus. The meeting was attended by 160 faculty, researchers, postdocs, graduate students, etc from all over the midwest, the south, and even a few people joining from Canada. Photos from the event will be posted here.
The Morimoto lab wishes everyone a joyous holiday season and a happy new year in 2025! The lab celebrated the end of 2024 with a dinner and gift exchange. Allison Kim may have set a record for the number of times her chosen gift was stolen and Rick lost both his wacky waving arm guy and jug of peanut M&Ms to mischievous lab elves. Pictures of the shenanigans can be found here.
The Morimoto lab welcomed 7th and 8th graders from a local school to give the kids hands-on experience working with some of the lab's tools. Pictures can be found in our Public Science page.
Morimoto lab undergraduate alumni Betty Lee-Hoang was back on campus for a reunion and visited her former bench. She is now an anesthesiologist in San Francisco! We love seeing all of the paths lab alumni take and love when they come back to visit the lab.
The Morimoto Lab enjoyed a scenic, science-filled annual retreat at the Chicago Botanic Gardens this November. Lively discussion ensued over the topic "What would lab members do with unlimited resources?" and alumni from years past joined via Zoom.
The Morimoto Lab has welcomed rotating graduate student, Tyler Masuda, who is working with Alejandro Rodriguez Gama to investigate the relationship between the heat shock response network and the innate immune response in C.elegans
and undergraduate researcher, Pierre Sun, who will be working with Laura Bott to focus on interindividual variation in proteostasis and cell stress responses as well as develop new tools to investigate this phenomenon in C. elegans. His goal is to identify specific genes and pathways that contribute to the variability.
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Welcome to the lab, Tyler and Pierre!
The Morimoto Lab welcomes Roy Kurtzbard who is pursuing a PhD with the University of Cambridge. Professor Morimoto is serving as one of his advisors.
Roy is working with the Morimoto Lab and the Proteostasis Consortium to utilize the annotated human proteostasis network (PN) to define a framework for health, subsequently investigating various protein conformational diseases. Welcome to the lab, Roy!
The Morimoto Lab has bid farewell to our summer interns, Tom Labrousse and Lena Katzenstein as well as our beloved Research Technologist, Ghania Imran, who is off to start a new adventure on the East Coast. They all brightened the lab and we're proud to call them alumni.
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Ghania was fashionable, as always, on her last day in the lab:
Many laughs were had as Lena reminisced about her time in the lab over the summer during her farewell lunch:
Tom left the lab with experience, memories, and the customary gift bag of Northwestern swag:
During this year's Morimoto Lab annual deep clean, Allison Kim was spotted making sure that even the top shelves remained dust-free.
The Morimoto Lab celebrated a beautiful afternoon at the lakefront with the rest of Northwestern's Molecular Biosciences department on July 23. The full annual lab photo can be viewed here.
Morimoto Lab almuni, Ambre Sala's most recent paper has been highlighted by Northwestern University Medical School's news media.
Welcome to the Morimoto Lab
We study the regulation of the heat shock response and the function of molecular chaperones and the proteostasis network to maintain the functional health of the proteome, to ensure optimal cellular health and to promote longevity. Our current interests are: to understand how different tissues in C. elegans sense diverse forms of environmental and physiological stress and communicate proteotoxic stress signals between tissues to determine organismal health, to determine the mechanisms by which proteostasis collapse occurs in aging and the relationship between proteostasis failure and other markers of aging. These observations are used to study cell stress responses and proteostasis in patient-derived direct differentiated neurons to develop small molecule strategies to restore the proteostasis network to delay or prevent proteome mismanagement that occurs in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, ALS and other protein folding disorders.
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C. elegans viewed through the microscope at the Morimoto Lab
C. elegans viewed through the microscope at the Morimoto Lab
The Proteostasis Network
Protein Quality Control (PQC) is regulated by the Proteostasis Network (PN) that controls protein synthesis, folding, transport and degradation of all proteins to ensure their stability and function. We study the properties and regulation of cell stress responses, molecular chaperones, the ubiquitin-proteasome and autophagy-lysosome system at the organismal level using C. elegans and in patient derived induced neurons to examine the mechanisms of proteotoxicity in cells and tissues against proteotoxic damage.
Aging Biology
Aging is associated with the appearance and accumulation of non-native proteins with folded states that are highly aggregation-prone and amyloidogenic. We are interested in the molecular basis of quality control failure in aging, that we have termed Proteostasis Collapse, which is associated with a functional decline in specific arms of the PN leading to protein aggregation.
Proteostasis in Neurodegenerative Diseases
Alzheimer's disease, ALS, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Frontal Temporal Dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases are all associated with age-dependent protein aggregation and cellular dysfunction. We have used both C. elegans and induced neurons to discover how protein misfolding and aggregates interferes with cellular function and to discover small molecules that enhance chaperone expression and function.
The Heat Shock Response
All cells (and organisms) respond to environmental stress such as elevated temperatures and other abiotic stressors by activation of HSF1 and selective transcriptional activation of molecular chaperones and other components of the PN. In isolated cells in tissue culture, the heat shock response (HSR) is regulated cell autonomously but in C. elegans, the HSR is regulated cell non-autonomously by the AFD sensory neuron to confer cellular healthspan and lifespan.
The Proteostasis Consortium
Northwestern’s Richard Morimoto leads a team of scientists including Ana Maria Cuervo at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Judith Frydman at Stanford University, Dan Finley at Harvard Medical School, Steve Finkbeiner at the Gladstone Institutes at University of California San Francisco, Jason Gestwicki at University of California San Francisco, and Jeff Kelly and Evan Powers at The Scripps Research Institute. Together, our research teams form the Proteostasis Consortium, studying the role of protein quality control in human aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
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Additional information on our research and the Proteostasis Consortium Wednesday Seminars be found at https://www.proteostasisconsortium.com/.