Julia von Blume, PhD

Julia von Blume completed her Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of Ulm, Germany, focusing on investigating the cell compartment-specific functions of Protein Kinase D (PKD). During postdoctoral work at institutions including the University of California San Diego and the Center of Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Spain, she uncovered how cells organize and transport constitutively secreted proteins.

Continuing her research trajectory in 2012, she assumed an independent group leader position at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried (MPI-B), Germany. At MPI-B, her research group combined in vitro reconstitution experiments with advanced cell biology techniques to reveal autonomous molecular mechanisms devoid of cargo receptors. A significant discovery emerged: luminal Golgi resident protein Cab45 forms a scaffold within the trans-Golgi network (TGN) to package secretory proteins, driven by transient luminal Ca2+ increases.

In 2019, Julia von Blume relocated from Germany to the US, joining the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine. Within this new academic home, her research broadened its scope to unravel the intricacies of insulin granule biogenesis in pancreatic beta cells. Key to this process is chromogranin B, which orchestrates the generation of a condensed protein scaffold at the moderately acidic pH of the TGN. This scaffold captures insulin and its processing enzymes, facilitating the budding of nascent insulin granules from the TGN. Drawing parallels to immune cells like neutrophils and mast cells that generate diverse secretory granules, the research poses a compelling question: Do granule-forming factors also exist in hematopoietic cells? Interestingly, chromogranin B, a player in insulin-secreting cells, prompts a similar line of inquiry.