Shaul Yogev
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About
Titles
Associate Professor of Neuroscience
Biography
Shaul got his BSc and MSc from Paris VII University in France, and his PhD from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he studied EGFR signaling with Benny Shilo. As a postdoc with Kang Shen at Stanford he developed imaging tools that enable using forward genetic approaches to study neuronal microtubules and axonal transport in live animals with single cell resolution.
The lab is interested in neuronal cell biology. We want to understand how the architecture of the neuronal cytoskeleton is established and how it supports polarized traffic in order to maintain structures such as synapses, which are found at a large distance from the cell body, over the lifetime of a neuron.
Appointments
Neuroscience
Assistant ProfessorPrimaryCell Biology
Associate Professor on TermSecondary
Other Departments & Organizations
- Biochemistry, Quantitative Biology, Biophysics and Structural Biology (BQBS)
- Cell Biology
- Cytoskeletal Dynamics
- Developmental Cell Biology and Genetics
- Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program
- Membrane Traffic
- Molecular Cell Biology, Genetics and Development
- Neuroscience
- Neuroscience Track
- Wu Tsai Institute
- Yale Combined Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS)
Research
Overview
Neurons are among the largest, most polarized cells in our bodies. The ability to precisely deliver cellular organelles such as synaptic vesicles or RNA particles to remote locations in axons and dendrites is fundamental for neurons to efficiently receive and propagate information. This long-range transport is carried out by molecular motors moving on cytoskeletal tracks, and is crucial for maintaining the composition of synapses over the lifetime of a neuron.
We are interested in the cell biological mechanisms that neurons employ to establish microtubule tracks and maintain the distribution of their organelles via polarized cargo transport. For example:
-How are microtubule tracks nucleated and patterned in axons and dendrites? How are their length, number and orientation optimized for transport in different neurons?
-How do molecular motors navigate their way on microtubule tracks to pick up and unload cargo at precise locations?
-What are the cues that determine the steady state localization of cargo such as RNA particles?
We established imaging and image analysis tools that allow us to study the organization of the cytoskeleton and overlying transport of cargo in live animals with high resolution in single cells. We use the nematode C. elegans for these studies because of its transparent body and its amenability to forward genetic approaches. The conservation of the basic cellular machinery between C. elegans and mammalian neurons allows us to use this simple model to gain insight into fundamental processes that occur in neurons of higher organisms. Because defective microtubule dependent transport is a hallmark of neurodegeneration, we hope that these insights will also help us understand the relevant mechanisms of cellular dysfunction.
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
Academic Achievements and Community Involvement
Links & Media
Media
Rapid reconstruction of neuronal microtubules in vivo
Neuronal microtubules are usually resolved through labor intensive EM reconstructions. We developed a rapid method that uses confocal images (left panel, microtubules labeled along their length with GFP and specifically at one end with RFP) to reconstruct the architecture of the cytoskeleton in live animals (bottom right panel). The top right panel shows a comparison of the fluorescent signal with EM data in the same neuron. This method opens the way to using genetic approaches to understand how microtubules are patterned and how such patterns affect the overlying cargo transport.
News
- January 09, 2024
The Most Popular Neuroscience Stories of 2023
- September 27, 2023
Yale researchers visualize “ultra-slow” axonal transport in a living organism
- August 29, 2023
Neuroscience Department has started its move to 100 College St
- August 15, 2023
Yale Researchers Reveal Key to Neuronal Transport System