| Citation | Ramanujan Hegde has made seminal contributions to understanding how nascent secretory and membrane proteins mature to their functional state, and how quality control pathways detect and resolve mistakes during maturation. Failures of protein quality control contribute to the pathogenesis of numerous human disorders including neurodegeneration. His achievements include the discovery and mechanistic dissection of a widely conserved membrane protein insertion pathway, the finding that errors of protein localisation can lead to neurodegeneration, and the discovery of quality control for mislocalised proteins. This work revealed the specialised mechanisms and fundamental importance of shielding hydrophobic proteins during their transit through the cytosol |