Deepika Vasudevan, PhD

While nearly all cells of the body can experience stress caused by extrinsic or intrinsic agents (changes in nutrient availability, infection, etc), some specialized cell types operate under elevated levels of basal cellular stress due to the nature of their function. Examples include photoreceptors, hepatocytes, adipocytes, b-islet, and others. Consequently, the signaling pathways that have evolved to respond to external stress have been coopted by these specialized cells to maintain homeostasis and for their normal function. Research in our lab is aimed at understanding the modalities of stress response signaling in specialized cells under homeostasis and stress, with a particular focus on mRNA translation. Our discovery platform is the fruit fly, where we use photoreceptors and fat tissues to figure out how and why translation of certain mRNAs is promoted at the expense of others. The long term goal of our work is to identify methods of elevating stress tolerance in specialized cells to improve their function, particularly in contexts of diseases such as retinal degeneration and metabolic disorders.