Marcos Sotomayor: Listening in on the cadherin family’s secrets

JCB • VOLUME 211 • NUMBER 5 • 2015 938 Growing up in Chile, Marcos Sotomayor was always interested in how things worked, and fascinated by his architect father’s technical drawings of buildings and his artist mother’s ability to create colorful sculptures. He also held an early interest in computers. Although he begged his parents for an Atari® game system like his friends had, they instead saved up for a PC, which Sotomayor used to teach himself programming during middle school. The purchase paid off. For the past two and a half years, Sotomayor has run his own laboratory at The Ohio State University, using both computational and experimental tools to discover structure-function relationships in macromolecular complexes involved in mechanotransduction and selective cellular adhesion. One area of interest is focused on creating structural models of the two cadherin proteins that form “tip links,” microscopic fi laments in hair cells of the inner ear that play a crucial role in hearing. These proteins, protocadherin 15 and cadherin 23, meet in a handshake confi guration; if the bond is broken, hearing is lost. The work is an extension of his graduate and postdoctoral studies. After studying physics in college, Sotomayor came to the University of Illinois for a PhD. His advisor, Klaus Schulten, was a biophysicist impressed by Sotomayor’s computational capabilities and put him to work, looking at the elastic properties of proteins and channels involved in mechanotransduction (1–3) and the role of calcium in maintaining the mechanical strength of cadherins (4). He furthered the work during postdoctoral studies with David Corey and Rachelle Gaudet at Harvard, where he did wet laboratory experiments for the fi rst time and obtained the structure of the protocadherin 15–cadherin 23 bond (5), with implications for the larger cadherin family (6). He recently spoke with JCB about his ongoing quest to study mechanotransduction in the inner ear and beyond.