Abdelhafid Saci
Cell biologist who, in Christopher Carpenter's lab at Beth Israel Deaconess, found that the small GTPase Rac1 binds mTOR and helps set the activity and location of both mTOR complexes
Division of Signal Transduction, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Carpenter lab (2003–2011, at the time of the study)
mTOR works inside two different protein complexes. mTORC1 controls cell growth and protein making, and mTORC2 controls cell shape and survival signals. Abdelhafid Saci is first author of a 2011 paper from Christopher Carpenter's lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston (SAC2011). The team found that Rac1, a small switch protein best known for reorganising the cell's internal skeleton, binds mTOR directly and is needed for both complexes to work properly. Rac1 helped bring the complexes to the right places inside the cell, at membranes, and cells without Rac1 activity grew smaller. The work was done in cultured cells. It linked the machinery of cell shape and movement to the machinery of cell growth.
Saci's earlier PubMed record with the Carpenter lab includes a 2003 paper in Immunity showing that the kinase BTK brings lipid-making enzymes to the cell membrane in B cells, which links Saci's work to the PI3K signalling system that sits upstream of mTOR. No current institutional page could be confirmed, so the affiliation shown is the one on the Atlas paper.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | M | Rac1 regulates the activity of mTORC1 and mTORC2 and controls cellular size SAC2011 First author: showed in cultured cells that Rac1 binds mTOR, regulates both mTORC1 and mTORC2, guides their location and controls cell size. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Abdelhafid Saci.
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- Lewis C. Cantley Co-discovered PI3K, the pathway that feeds into mTOR from growth factors
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