P
rachee Avasthi took a winding path
to specializing in studying cilia—the
hairlike appendages that enable cells
to move about and sense their environ-
ments. During her undergraduate days at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
she did lab work ranging from classifying
insects collected from a local pond to prob-
ing synaptic plasticity in mice. “Pretty much
no matter what type of research I was doing,
I really enjoyed it.”
Still, of all the areas she explored as an
undergrad, Avasthi, now a cell biologist at the
University of Kansas (KU), says she found the
brain to be “particularly interesting because
it’s so unknowable.” She chose to study neu-
roscience in graduate school at the University
of Utah, and her research focused on specific
cilia that help the eye’s photoreceptors detect
light. “All of these proteins and the mem-
branes get sort of eaten up by adjacent cells
in the distal portions [of the cilia], and then
everything needs to be made fresh,” Avasthi
says. A huge amount of protein trafficking
from the cell body to the cilia therefore has to
happen to maintain normal function of these
photoreceptors. Using proteomics, Avasthi
and her colleagues identified a protein, kine-
sin-II, that’s critical to this molecular transport
in cone cells.^1
To build on that research, Avasthi joined
Wallace Marshall’s lab at the University of
California, San Francisco, as a postdoc to work
on Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a green alga that
is a model organism for studying cilia. Avasthi
decided to look for pieces of cellular machin-
ery involved in transporting proteins into cilia.
It’s difficult to do targeted gene knockouts in
C. reinhardtii, so she instead treated the cells
with chemical inhibitors to see which affected
the cilia and, therefore, which proteins were
needed for transport. The cytoskeleton pro-
tein actin turned out to be a key player in ciliary
transport—a surprise, since previous studies
had found the protein had only a small effect
on cilia.^2Since starting her own lab at KU Medical
Center in 2015, Avasthi has continued look-
ing at actin’s role in transporting proteins to
cilia. David Kovar, a cell biologist at the Uni-
versity of Chicago who has collaborated with
her on this work,^3 says he was struck early on
by “how excited she was about the topic, and
the whole process of doing science and the
process of discovery.” Her enthusiasm is con-
tagious, he says. Avasthi recently developed
a method for visualizing actin within cilia—an
innovation fellow KU cell biologist Bill Dentler
finds particularly impressive. He worked on a
similar project years ago but hit a dead end,
he says. “She’s basically taken that forward
and come up with results that we never really
thought of before.”
In addition to her love of the science,
Avasthi also values helping other early-
career researchers. “When you start your
own lab, you’re completely out in the dark-
ness on your own.... You have a million
questions,” she says. She started New PI
Slack, an online community of more than
1,000 assistant professors, so they could
advise each other on common challenges.
She also serves on boards of eLife and ASAP
Bio, where she advocates for the interests of
researchers launching their careers. At jour-
nals, granting agencies, and other organiza-
tions, she says, “having that voice
at the table is really important.”gREFERENCES
1.P. Avasthi et al., “Trafficking of
membrane proteins to cone but not
rod outer segments is dependent on
heterotrimeric kinesin-II,” J Neurosci,
29:14287–98, 2009. (Cited 56 times)
2.P. Avasthi et al., “Actin is required for IFT
regulation in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii,”
Curr Biol, 24:2025–32, 2014. (Cited 30 times)
3.J.R. Christensen et al., “Chlamydomonas
reinhardtii formin and profilin are optimized
for acute rapid actin filament assembly,”
bioArxiv, doi:10.1101/096008, 2017.SCIENTIST TO WATCHPrachee Avasthi: Cell Cosmetologist
© MAGGIE MCLANDSBOROUGH
12.2018 | THE SCIENTIST12.2018 | THE SCIENTIST 57Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology, University of Kansas Medical Center, Age: 39IBY SHAWNA WILLIAMS