Teaser: My group is interested in understanding the mechanisms that govern functional specificity within the Endosomal Sorting Complex Required for Transport (ESCRT) pathway, a cellular machinery that mediates reverse membrane remodelling. In my talk I will discuss our work on how specific protein complexes are tailored to perform different functions by binding differentially to components of the pathway depending on the required activity. This way, the same cellular machinery can catalyse membrane constriction and scission of thin membranous stalks present in topologically equivalent processes such as endosomal sorting of ubiquitinated membrane cargo, cytokinetic abscission, membrane repair or enveloped virus budding.