Welcome to the Hochstrasser Lab

Work in our lab resides at the crossroads of biochemistry and genetics and takes advantage of the many research benefits offered by the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model eukaryotic cell system. A short, but by no means exhaustive, list of areas of active study can be found here.

For most short-lived eukaryotic proteins, attachment to ubiquitin is an obligatory step in the cascade of events that culminates in their degradation. Protein turnover via the highly conserved ubiquitin-proteasome system is central to a great variety of regulatory mechanisms, including many of medical relevance. We wish to understand, at a mechanistic and molecular level, how specific proteins are rapidly degraded within cells even while most proteins are spared. This entails detailed functional analysis of the various elements of the ubiquitin-proteasome system, from the degradation signals targeting proteins for destruction, to the components of the ubiquitin conjugation machinery, to the proteasome itself.