UAlberta medical researcher talks about major scientific discovery

Re-write the textbooks and take a look back at old research because there's a new cog in our cellular machinery that has been discovered by researchers at the University of Alberta, together with colleagues from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.

Inside every cell that isn't bacterial, there is a membrane trafficking system and it has long been known to have four protein complexes, called adaptins, which are all involved in moving things in, out and around the cell.

Joel Dacks, in the department of cell biology in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, along with Cambridge colleague Margaret Robinson, have discovered there is a fifth adaptin, and according to their research it has been around for billions of years, just no one has been able to see it.

"What this does for cell biology is open up a whole new avenue of research," said Dacks. "We thought there were four big players in the processes of how things got moved around in the back half of the cell. There's a fifth player on the field, we just couldn't see it."

Understanding how trafficking works in cells is vital because when something goes wrong in the cell's trafficking system that is oftentimes when you get disease. Mutations in genes involved in trafficking are implicated in a number of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease, and ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

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