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Home > Research Leaders > H to M > Sean Munro
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Sean Munro

Functional organisation of the Golgi apparatus

The compartments of the secretory and endocytic pathways are connected by membrane-bound carriers that bud from, and then fuse with, specific organelles. The accuracy of this traffic depends on the organelles having an ‘identity’ by which the trafficking machinery can recognise them. This identity is defined by organelle-specific G proteins of the Arf and Rab families and by phosphoinositide lipids.

We are interested in how active G proteins are generated in a spatially restricted manner, and what cytosolic proteins or ‘effectors’ then recognise them.

Our work is focussed on the Golgi apparatus, an organelle that plays a central role in the sorting and modification of proteins in the secretory pathway. The Golgi contains a number of Arf and Rab proteins, and we apply biochemical and genetic methods to identify their interacting partners both in mammalian tissue culture cells and in Drosophila.

One major class of effector that we are investigating are the long coiled-coil proteins that are believed to act in the tethering of carriers prior to fusion.

An understanding of how organelle identity is established and recognised is only starting to emerge but promises to reveal much about the underlying logic of the organisation of eukaryotic cells.

The golgin coiled-coil proteins illustration
The golgin coiled-coil proteins are attached to specific cisternae in the Golgi stack via C-terminal domains. Each golgin captures a specific type of transport vesicle. TBC1D23 bridges vesicles to golgin-97 and golgin-245 but for the other golgins it remains unclear what feature on the vesicle they recognise.

Selected Papers

  • Gillingham AK, Bertram J, Begum F, Munro S. (2019)
    In vivo identification of GTPase interactors by mitochondrial relocalization and proximity biotinylation.
    eLife 8: pii: e45916.
  • Muschalik N, Munro S. (2018)
    Golgins
    Curr Biol. 28(8): R374-R376.
  • Shin JJH, Gillingham AK, Begum F, Chadwick J, Munro S. (2017)
    TBC1D23 is a bridging factor for endosomal vesicle capture by golgins at the trans-Golgi.
    Nat. Cell Biol. 19: :1424-1432.
  • Wong, M. and Munro, S. (2014)
    Membrane trafficking. The specificity of vesicle traffic to the Golgi is encoded in the golgin coiled-coil proteins.
    Science 346: (6209):1256898.

Group Members

  • Antonio Galindo
  • Alison Gillingham
  • Swantje Kettelhut
  • James Manton
  • Katherine Meade
  • Nadine Muschalik
  • Tim Stevens
  • Emma Stone
  • Alexander Van Vliet
  • Nikita Zubkov

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