Fatima Abrar

First author of a 2026 review on how chemical tags on the autophagy receptor SQSTM1/p62 are linked to neurodegenerative disease

Department of Biology, University of Waterloo · NeurdyPhagy Lab (M.Sc. student, according to the lab's people page)

Fatima Abrar is the first author of a 2026 review in Autophagy, written with Dale D. O. Martin. The review is about SQSTM1/p62, a protein that grabs damaged or unwanted cell material and hands it to the autophagy system, the cell's recycling pathway. The authors go through the small chemical tags added to p62 after it is made (phosphorylation, ubiquitination, acetylation, S-acylation and S-nitrosylation) and show how each tag changes where p62 sits and what it does. This matters for diseases such as Alzheimer disease, ALS and Huntington disease, where this tidying system goes wrong. It is a review of published work, not a new experiment, and mTORC1, the growth-control complex, is one of the regulators it covers.

Abrar works in the NeurdyPhagy Lab, led by Dale Martin at the University of Waterloo Department of Biology. The lab's people page lists Abrar as a Master's student and says the research looks at how protein mislocalization affects proteins needed for autophagy in Huntington disease. PubMed shows Abrar as first author of a 2025 research paper in the FASEB Journal on reduced palmitoylation of p62 in Huntington disease, and as co-author of a 2024 paper on the protein SVIP and a 2023 review on palmitoylation in neurodegeneration, all from the same lab. A current position beyond the lab page could not be confirmed.

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