Gregory Emery

Biography

During his years of training in biochemistry, Gregory Emery was very early interested in vesicular transport. Interest concretized during his doctoral years (1997-2002) with Dr. Jean Gruenberg of the University of Geneva (Switzerland), a high place for advanced research in endocytosis. For five years, Gregory Emery is working specifically on the characterization of transmembrane proteins of the p24 family, involved in the organization of the Golgi apparatus. It is by wishing to move from a culture model to an animal model that Gregory Emery joins the group of Dr. Juergen Knoblich in Vienna (Austria) to work on Drosophila. This, as part of his postdoctoral career, successively to IMP and IMBA where he then focuses his research on the role of recycling endosome during the asymmetrical division. At IRIC, Gregory Emery focuses primarily on understanding the role of vesicular transport in cell signaling, primarily using the Drosophila fly model.

Research Interest

Vesicular transport has long been considered as a simple transport mechanism for proteins. This vision has changed radically and vesicular transport is now known to be involved in many key developmental events, such as cell signaling or cell polarity establishment, as well as tumor formation. Our group primarily uses the Drosophila melanogaster as a model system to study how vesicular transport regulates cell signaling, particularly during development. Our main interest is to understand the role of endocytosis in the spatiotemporal regulation of receptor activity and in signal transduction. We are currently focusing on collective migration as well as Notch signaling. Cell migration is a fascinating process involving the polarization of cells. Metastases are formed from cells that migrate from a tumor to form a new tumor. There is growing evidence that these cells do not migrate individually, but in groups during a so-called collective migration. To study this type of migration. We use the egg chamber of the Drosophila fly, where cells called border cells migrate into a small group. These cells are attracted by a process involving the activation of receptors with tyrosine kinase activity. We have recently shown that specific transport steps of the enodocytosis pathway polarize the activity of these receptors. We are studying in more detail this regulation, in particular, we want to understand how endocytosis regulates the formation of structures necessary for cell motility and how this is coordinated in the cell group to migrate in the right direction. In addition we want to determine if the identified molecular mechanisms are conserved in other collective migrations in vivo in Drosophila and in mammals.