Eguna: 20269/05/06
Ordua: 12:00etan
Tokia: Adela Moyua Gela

Seminar Title: "Organelle Cross-talk and Lipid Trafficking: Bridging Mitochondria and Ferroptosis"

Soni DESHWAL is passionate about the basic questions in mitochondrial biology. Currently, she is leading a group at Helmholtz-Munich, funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Her research focuses on the metabolic plasticity of mitochondria, particularly in relation to stress responses and cell death. Soni gained extensive mitochondrial expertise during her postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and during her PhD at the University of Padova. She became particularly interested in ferroptosis during her postdoc, where she discovered that mitochondria can inhibit ferroptosis by transporting a lipid molecule, CoQ, to the plasma membrane.

Her work aims to understand how mitochondria adapt to cellular stress and how their metabolic flexibility can be leveraged to combat diseases like neurodegeneration and mitochondrial disorders.

Mitochondria are highly adaptable organelles, capable of reprogramming bioenergetic and biosynthetic pathways to meet the demands of a changing environment. This metabolic flexibility allows them to adjust to various stress conditions, regulate redox balance, and coordinate with other organelles to influence cellular outcomes. A key aspect of our work is investigating how mitochondria use this plasticity to regulate processes like ferroptosis—a form of iron-dependent, lipid peroxidation-driven cell death. By elucidating these mechanisms, we aim to uncover how mitochondrial metabolism can be harnessed to either promote cellular resilience or drive cell death, with implications for diseases like neurodegeneration and mitochondrial disorders.