Yasin Dagdas
@plantophagy
Cell biologist excited about autophagy, quality control, evolution, and membrane trafficking. Reads and thinks about academic mentoring, equality & diversity.
Most #PlantBio2026 audience when we were listening the “plants make and listen sounds” plenary talk
@diorkelley.bsky.social wins the Excellence in Education and Mentorship Award!!! 🎉 so richly deserved!!! #PlantBio2026
Liwen Jiang, the 2026 Enid MacRobbie awardee!!! Richly deserved & Amazing news for Plant Cell Biology community! #PlantBio2026
100 years of #plantscience publishing!!! Thank you @plantphys.bsky.social #PlantBio2026
Excited for the American and Canadian Plant Biology Society meeting in Ottawa-Canada! #PlantBio2026
#Heidelberg is ready for the 🎆🎇🎆! Not sure how she feels about it? #caturday
& here's our code of conduct document (R.I.P.): ydagdas-lab.github.io/Lab-Website/... Let us know if we forgot something.
My kids: #Heidelberg weather is bipolar! Hard to argue against it :(
Take-home message: autophagy promotes cellular survival by preventing excessive cell death during viral replication.
Q: What is the cargo? A: This was a real surprise. EDS1, a key protein regulating immune cell death in plants. EDS1 mutation almost completely rescues the autophagy mutant phenotype.
There is clearly some selectivity. Q: What are the receptors degrading this cargo? A: Metabolic enzymes that can form filaments and switch from oligomers to monomers during viral infection. The motif linking them to autophagy is buried in the filamentous form.
So, do they induce mitophagy? Not exactly. We do not see mitophagosomes induced upon viral infection, but instead observe degradation of matrix proteins that likely leak out during infection.
Q: Do they induce autophagy? A: Absolutely. Marion developed an elegant live-cell imaging system and showed this in great detail. See the mitochondria clumps induced by viral proteins.
Not surprisingly, #autophagy mutants are susceptible to viral infection. Surprisingly, this is not due to higher viral load. Instead, our data suggest that autophagy helps clear the cellular mess created by viruses in the cell.
Marion came to the lab with the idea of using viruses that target different organelles as probes to discover new organelle autophagy receptors. As often happens with viruses, we found something else.
+ssRNA viruses remodel cellular compartments to create viral replication factories. See the movie where TCV creates VRCs on mitochondria.
I took a photo of her everyday before or after work. Here are some of photos from the #swandiary
We finally have the babies 🥳🤩🥰She cared for them every hour of every day since mid-April. 😊😊😊
“play in the blissful blindness between the hedges of the past and future”
Why? The vacuole. A key ion storage hub and the endpoint of autophagy. Disrupt autophagy in trichoblasts → disrupt vacuolar function → lose stress resilience. (CoroNa Green made this beautifully visible.)