RMS Early Career Award winner revealed

Commending her studies in membrane trafficking pathways the RMS is delighted to announce Katherine Paine of the University of York as the winners of its 2022 Early Career Award.Katherine, who began her PhD in 2018 at Chris MacDonald’s laboratory, was chosen in recognition of the novel approaches in imaging and cytometry she has brought to her studies on the regulation of cell surface membrane proteins.

She will receive a £100 cash prize and an invitation to deliver a keynote presentation at Microscopy: Advances, Innovation, Impact 2022 – an event which includes the RMS Annual General Meetings.

RMS Early Career Committee Chair, Liam Rooney said: “Not only have Katherine’s approaches allowed her to discover novel mechanisms related to surface protein trafficking in yeast, but these methods can now be used by others in the field in the future. It is a privilege to commend her achievements with this award.”

Cell surface membrane proteins perform diverse and critical functions and are spatially and temporally regulated by membrane trafficking pathways, a process evolutionary conserved from yeast to humans. MacDonald lab uses yeast as a model organism to study these pathways.

Initially using standard confocal microscopy, it became clear that this alone presented limitations in visualisation of some of the processes of interest. This led to Katherine helping with optimisation of a suite of imaging and cytometry approaches to study surface proteins, including Airyscan2, structured illumination (SIM) and photoactivated localisation microscopy (PALM); all of which can be coupled to bespoke microfluidic exchange systems.

Katherine is also in the process of optimising a high throughput method to measure Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) in yeast using robotics and flow cytometry.

More information online