César Bernat Silvestre
Post-Doctoral Researcher
ESCRT-III complex has emerged as a key player for deforming and breaking membranes. These processes are essential for many cellular functions, including biogenesis of MVBs, cytokinetic abscission, nuclear envelope sealing and exosome shedding among others. My aim is to understand the dynamics of the ESCRT-III complex in the different ESCRT-III cellular functions, and resolve what controls the time of the sequence recruitment of ESCRT-III machinery. Moreover, I am also interested in studying the function of CHMP1 and IST1 proteins, two ESCRT-III subunits, which form the fission complex and their role is understudied in vivo. For these purposes, I combine cell and molecular biology and biochemistry techniques.
I studied Pharmacy in Valencia (Spain) before joining the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology department for my PhD in Valencia. For my thesis, supervised by Fernando Aniento and María Jesús Marcote, I studied the transport of GPI-anchored proteins along the early secretory pathway in Arabidopsis, focusing on the role of GPI-anchor remodeling and p24 proteins as cargo receptors. Then, I joined the Roux’s lab in Geneva (Switzerland) in January 2022 for investigating the dynamics of the ESCRT-III complex assembly and fission in different cellular processes.