Jacob Liebovitz

Research/Areas of Interest

Peroxisomes are degraded by pexophagy, which is a form of autophagy specific to peroxisomes. Our lab has shown that UBXD8 is a P97 adaptor which recognizes ubiquitylated, membrane-bound proteins and recruits P97, a protein unfoldase which extracts the ubiquitylated proteins from the membranes of organelles to regulate autophagy. When UBXD8 is knocked out in cells, pexophagy was shown to increase as the ubiquitylated proteins in the peroxisomal membrane were not extracted by P97, leading to the eventual pexophagy of the entire peroxisome. The goal of my project is to isolate peroxisomes in wild type and UBXD8 knockout cells and use quantitative proteomics to interrogate the peroxisomal proteome.