Christopher Beh

Areas of interest

Cell growth is dictated in large part by the bustling traffic of molecular cargo moving between different membranes within cells. Fats and lipids are perhaps the most difficult cargo to transport. Like oil on water, fats and lipids do not mix well with the cell’s internal fluid and require specialized transport systems to move around. Cholesterol transport represents a good example of this complication. Cholesterol is made within internal membranes and must be transferred to the cell surface, but how it moves is not well understood. Proteins inserted into membranes also present a problem for transport within cells. Vesicle carriers, like small bubbles, bud off internal membranes and target embedded membrane proteins to other recipient membranes. How vesicular transport to-and-from the cell surface is coordinated is still not known, but it is an important regulatory mechanism for controlling cell size and growth. All transport mechanisms we study operate in yeast as well as humans, so we have chosen to exploit the advantages of yeast molecular genetic techniques for manipulating cells. Yeast cells represent simple versions of our own cells, so what we learn in yeast can be applied to understanding transport within human cells.