Building clathrin coats at the cell surface

Linton Traub

Dr. Traub has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel (1991). He is currently an Associate Professor with tenure at the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

The Traub lab is interested in understanding the molecular basis of intracellular protein trafficking events, and focusses primarily on clathrin-coated vesicles. These small polyhedral structures were the first transport carriers to be discovered, and are still the prototypical example of coat-dependent cargo sorting into transport vesicles. At the cell surface, endocytic clathrin coats provide a major portal to the interior of most eukaryotic cells and play a pivotal role not only in the internalization of extracellular nutrients, but also in modulating the density and activity of important membrane proteins, like signaling receptors. A good example of this is the neurological synapse.