Spring 2025 Grantee Highlight:
William Sellers

William Sellers, MD, PhD
Cancer Program Director, Core Institute Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

The Sellers Lab has developed a new method to better understand how cells control protein levels, focusing on a group of enzymes called CRL4 ubiquitin ligases. These enzymes help tag unwanted proteins with a molecule called ubiquitin, marking them for destruction. This process is essential for keeping cells healthy and balanced.

While there are over 600 of these ligases in the human body, scientists still don’t know exactly which proteins most of them target. To help solve this problem, the Sellers Lab created a scalable approach to map out the targets—or substrates—of these ligases.

They are now applying this method to study the CRL4 family, which is involved in critical cellular functions like DNA repair and the cell cycle. CRL4 ligases have also been linked to promising drug strategies that work by triggering the destruction of harmful proteins.