The structural basis for how motors move in vitro is rapidly being elucidated, but how their action is controlled in vivo remains mysterious. My laboratory is studying the specificity, coordination, and regulation of motors inside the cell.
Some organelles simultaneously engage multiple motors, for different directions of travel.
Finally, intracellular transport has to be coordinated with other events in the cell and can be modulated by extracellular signals. To answer these questions, we have chosen to analyze vesicle transport in Drosophila embryos. On the one hand, vesicle traffic in these embryos shows many of the general characteristics we would like to understand, such as cargo specifity, coordination between motors, and developmental regulation of motor activity. On the other hand, this experimental system provides a unique opportunity to dissect these phenomena because we can study them with approaches from genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics. For example, we can follow the motion of individual organelles by video-microscopy and isolate mutations that alter the regulation of transport.