Anđela Šarić Allen Distinguished Investigator

The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation announced today the new Allen Distinguished Investigators, who will receive $9 million in total for research in membrane biophysics and organelle communication. In one of the six funded projects, Anđela Šarić, professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), will lead an international collaboration to investigate how chemically active membranes influence cell shape.

The funding, provided through the Allen Distinguished Investigators program, will drive innovative research in organelle communication and membrane biophysics. Together these awards represent a total of 9 million dollars in funding from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, as recommended by The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, and will be distributed between 14 researchers investigating the biological principles governing fundamental cellular functions and how they interact. These foundational, cutting-edge research projects promise to advance the fields of biology and medicine.

“We are excited to have the Membrane Biophysics and Organelle Communication cohorts shed light onto two fundamental and interwoven aspects of cellular life – the dynamic functions of cell membranes and the complex interactions between organelles within the cell,” said Kathy Richmond, Executive Vice President and Director of the Frontiers Group and the Office of Science and Innovation at the Allen Institute. “These investigators will expand the frontiers of our basic science understanding of cell dynamics through ambitious and innovative approaches that span the tree of life, from single-celled amoebae to human cells, with important implications for human health.”

The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation will award 1.5 million dollars over three years to each of the six research projects involving pioneering international researchers. These innovative projects are early-stage research efforts that promise to have catalytic scientific potential.

Chemically active membranes in the generation of cell shape

Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) Professor Anđela Šarić teams up with Kerstin Göpfrich from Heidelberg University and Buzz Baum from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Together, they will explore how the exchange of chemicals between cells causes them to reshape. This project challenges the assumption that the cell membrane is a passive material, changing shape only when pushed or pulled. The researchers will use simulations, synthetic cells, and live archaeal cell communities to determine the chemical conditions that lead to the formation of tentacle-like protrusions cells use to explore their environment. This project will shed light on how cell membranes enable cells to interact dynamically with their environment in a broad ecological and evolutionary context. “While this process, membrane reshaping via chemical consumption, has never been studied in any depth, there are hints that it is widespread in nature,” says Šarić. “Thus, our work will have important implications for biomedicine, our understanding of cells, cell communities, symbioses, and the evolution of complex cells like our own.”