Profile of Peter Novick

Abstract

There was a time in graduate school when Peter Novick wasn’t sure if his research would lead anywhere. As a graduate student in cell biologist Randy Schekman’s laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, Novick had been using a genetic approach to understand the yeast secretory pathway, responsible for moving proteins out of the cell. Now a professor at the University of California, San Diego, Novick says it was only when he identified a mutant in which vesicles piled up inside the cell, showing that it had a defective secretory pathway, that he knew he had made a breakthrough. “That convinced me. Before then I wasn’t sure if I had a thesis project, afterwards it was pretty clear I did,” he says. Peter Novick. It turned out that Novick had a lot more than a thesis project. His graduate work paved the way for Schekman’s detailed analysis of the secretory pathway, work for which Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “Peter Novick was instrumental in starting our genetic approach to the secretory pathway in yeast,” says Schekman. “Already as a first year graduate student, he showed great skill and devised the screen and a selection procedure that allowed us to isolate the first mutant, sec1-1, and within another year, mutations representing 23 genes that defined the major stages in the secretory pathway,” he says. In eukaryotic cells, such as yeast and higher organisms, the secretory pathway transports proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), an organelle where the proteins are synthesized, to the Golgi apparatus, a cellular compartment that serves as a sorting station. From the Golgi, the proteins then move to the cells’ plasma membrane. The latter step involves transporting the proteins in vesicles that fuse with the plasma membrane and release proteins to the outside of the cell. The regulation of such intracellular trafficking is relevant to many human diseases, including cancer and diabetes. Understanding how yeast secretes proteins has also been used in biotechnology to produce proteins such as insulin. Novick says his graduate work led to his continued interest in teasing apart the many components of the secretory pathway. Using a combination of yeast genetics and cell biology, he has spent his career investigating the tightly regulated mechanisms involved in intracellular transport. For his contributions to our understanding of this fundamental physiological process, Novick was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. “In his own lab, first at Yale and now at UC San Diego, Peter launched a brilliant independent career with the discovery that a protein called Sec4 encodes a small GTP-binding protein, the first of three dozen so-called Rab proteins that we now know control the targeting of transport vesicles to all the many destinations in the cell,” says Schekman. “On the strength of this work and much more in subsequent years, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, an honor that was in my opinion long overdue,” he says.