Alexander Whitworth: Parkinson’s disease, mitochondria and calcium: Lessons from Drosophila

Alexander J Whitworth

Cambridge University

Parkinson’s disease, mitochondria and calcium: Lessons from Drosophila

Hosted by Kostas Tokatlides at the UofG SoMB Seminar on 23.4.25


Sketchnote of a scientific talk about the way that the proteins pink1 and arkin are involved in autophagy of mitochondria of drosophila in a model of parkinsons disease - the model is used to find a protein that seems to have a major role CSMD and that has homolges in humans that may be parkinson's associtaed. Further on to the importance of calcium handling by mitochondria and how that impacts neurological diseases



Papers mentioned in the talk:


Madeleine J. Twyning, Roberta Tufi, Thomas P. Gleeson, Kinga M. Kolodziej, Susanna Campesan, Ana Terriente-Felix, Lewis Collins, Federica De Lazzari, Flaviano Giorgini, Alexander J. Whitworth. (2024) Partial loss of MCU mitigates pathology in vivo across a diverse range of neurodegenerative disease models, Cell Reports, Volume 43, Issue 2.

A Sanchez-Martinez, A Martinez, AJ Whitworth. (2024) Analysis of Mitophagy Reporters in Drosophila. Selective Autophagy: Methods and Protocols, 79-93.

Martinez, A., Lectez, B., Ramirez, J. et al. Quantitative proteomic analysis of Parkin substrates in Drosophila neurons. Mol Neurodegeneration 12, 29 (2017).

A Martinez, A Sanchez-Martinez, JT Pickering, MJ Twyning, Madeleine J Twyning, Ana Terriente-Felix, Po-Lin Chen, Chun-Hong Chen, Alexander J Whitworth. (2024) Mitochondrial CISD1/Cisd accumulation blocks mitophagy and genetic or pharmacological inhibition rescues neurodegenerative phenotypes in Pink1/parkin models. Molecular Neurodegeneration 19 (1), 12.

Terriente-Felix A, Wilson EL, Whitworth AJ (2020): Drosophila phosphatidylinositol-4 kinase fwd promotes mitochondrial fission and can suppress Pink1/parkin phenotypes. PLoS Genet 16, e1008844

Granatiero V, De Stefani D & Rizzuto R (2017) Mitochondrial calcium handling in physiology and disease. Adv Exp Med Biol 982, 25-47

Lee JJ, Sanchez-Martinez A, Zarate AMartinez, Benincá C, Mayor U, Clague MJ & Whitworth AJ (2018) Basal mitophagy is widespread inbut minimally affected by loss of Pink1 or parkin. J Cell Biol 217, 1613-1622.

Franco M, Seyfried NT, Brand AH, Peng J & Mayor U (2011) A novel strategy to isolate ubiquitin conjugates reveals wide role for ubiquitination during neural development. Mol Cell Proteomics 10, M110.002188.