From the Lab to the Limelight - Blog version of our #TraineeTuesday Twitter series
This #TraineeTuesday, we're highlighting Oliver Glomb, PhD, a postdoc in the Yogev Lab! From publishing a paper in Developmental Cell to starting a lab in Germany, he has plenty to celebrate.
In his recent paper, Oliver unraveled a poorly understood process called slow axonal transport.
Neurons rely on long-range transport to distribute proteins from the cell body to their final destination in the neurite. This process, called axonal transport, has been classified into two major routes: slow and fast. Despite being a major trafficking route for hundreds of axonal proteins — including Tau, a-synuclein, tubulin, and actin — much of slow axonal transport remains a mystery.
Oliver helped demystify the route by being the first to visualize it by fluorescence microscopy in vivo. In his paper, he specifically visualized the slow axonal transport of spectrin (a cytoskeletal protein) in vivo in C. elegans. To do so, he developed a novel labeling strategy to visualize the transport and identify components of the transport machinery involved.
Though slow axonal transport became the star of the show, the project was initially inspired by Oliver’s interest in spectrin biology. Spectrin is crucial to forming the membrane skeleton, which contributes to the mechanical resilience of neurons, regulates the diameter of an axon, and scaffolds many proteins.
Impairing the transport of spectrin resulted in neurodegeneration in the nematodes. As many slow axonal transport cargos are associated with neurodegenerative diseases, I believe that understanding how those proteins are distributed in the neuron can help us to better understand the cellular dysfunction that underlies diseases.
Oliver Glomb, PhD
The success of this project and its applications helped Oliver get hired in his home country. In November, he will move to Tübingen, Germany, to start his own lab.
Oliver grew up in Berlin and studied biochemistry at Ulm University. He became interested in cell biology during his PhD, when he had the chance to visualize intracellular transport in yeast cells. “I became fascinated by how cells can coordinate movement events of cargos through such a complex environment and with many different motors providing forces,” Oliver said. “When considering to do a Postdoc, I wanted to continue my journey on intracellular transport but in a cell type in which transport occurs over much longer distances.”
At the time, he came across Dr. Shaul Yogev’s main postdoctoral work, which studied how microtubule organization affects transport of synaptic vesicle precursors in neurons. Fascinated by this work, Oliver reached out to Dr. Yogev to apply to be a postdoc in his lab. The rest is history.
Oliver described his 3.5 years at Yale as “an amazing journey.” He has most enjoyed engaging with researchers across all aspects of neuronal and cellular biology.
The concentration of researchers in one place that are so passionate for their science makes this place very exciting and helped me to progress very fast with my project. The number of seminars, both to become inspired by the work of my colleagues as well as to receive feedback on my own work, makes the research at Yale outstanding.
Oliver Glomb, PhD
Going forward in his research, Oliver will use spectrin as a proxy to investigate the mechanisms that underlie slow axonal transport. He has a few key questions in mind: What makes slow axonal transport that slow and why does it need to be slow? Which pathways mediate when a cargo is being transported and determine their final destination? He also hopes to identify common principles of slow axonal transport by using his labeling strategy to visualize trafficking of other proteins.