Vivek Malhotra is one of world’s leaders on protein secretion and cellular compartmentation. His work  is  focused  on  how  cellular  compartments  are  made  and  communicate  with  each  other,  and  how cells duplicate their compartments  during cell division. He has been  studying these processes since the late 80s and is acknowledge world wide for his creativity and novel findings. He obtained his Ph.D from Oxford and was a postdoc at Stanford University. He was a professor at University  of  California  San  Diego  for  18  years.  He  joined  the  Centre  for  Genomic  Regulation, Barcelona  as  a  coordinator  of  the  Cell and  Developmental  Biology  Programme and  ICREA Research Professor.

Research interests

We want to understand the mechanism by which eukaryotic cells model membranes to generate transport carriers based on their needs. For example, how bulky molecules such as the collagens are secreted, how mucins are secreted in a regulated manner, and how transport carriers form at the Golgi. Protein such as TANGO’s, PIMS and PKD are helping us resolve this issue. We have uncovered a new pathway by which cells secrete proteins that cannot enter the ER-Golgi pathway of secretion. We hope this will help us understand the mechanism by which cells release various cytokines, growth and angiogenic factors in a signal dependent manner. Finally we are interested in the mechanism by which Golgi complex is built during repeated cycles of cell-division.