Carlos R. Morales

Biography

Carlos R. Morales received his D.V.M. from Northeast University (U.N.N.E.), Argentina and his Ph.D. in Anatomy and Cell Biology from McGill University, Canada. Presently he is a full Professor at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University. He is a recipient of the “J.C.B. Grant Senior Scientist Award of the Canadian Association for Anatomy Neurobiology and Cell Biology”, the “Honour List for Educational Excellence of the Faculty of Medicine, McGill University”, and the “Outstanding Service Award of the American Society of Andrology”. He is member of several societies including the American Society for Cell Biology. He has published 114 original papers in peer review journals, 25 reviews and/or book chapters and he is the associated editor of two books. His research focuses on the mechanism of trafficking of newly synthesized hydrolases and soluble lysosomal proteins. His laboratory has recently identified sortilin as a new lysosomal sorting receptor.

Research Interest

For a long time lysosomes were considered a terminal degradation compartment of the cell. However, this view rapidly changed in the mid 80s by the demonstration that these organelles and their content displayed multiple specialized dynamic functions. From the onset of our research we contributed to this paradigm shift with a series of articles describing the biogenesis and fate of lysosomes in a professional phagocyte, the Sertoli cell. Our kinetic studies demonstrated for the first time that lysosomes turn over with a half-life of approximately 6 hours (Biol. Reprod., 34: 207-218, 1985). We also depicted the precursor compartments of lysosomes using novel markers and we were one of the first laboratories to identify and describe the "endosome" both functionally and morphologically. We used several knockouts (KO) mice models, dominant-negative competitors of sphingolipid activator proteins and lysosomal inhibitors, to demonstrate that multivesicular bodies and lysosomes are transient organelles. We demonstrated that most lysosomal storage disorders occur due to a blockage in the progression of multivesicular bodies to mature lysosomes. We showed that this blockage results in the accumulation of large lysosomes containing extensive amounts of undigested membranes