Brian M. Zid
Biochemist at UC San Diego who studies how cells decide which messenger RNAs to translate under stress, and who showed as a Caltech student that the mTOR target 4E-BP is needed for dietary restriction to lengthen fly lifespan
Faculty, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California San Diego (from about 2017) · postdoc, Harvard University, Erin O'Shea lab (2014) · graduate research, California Institute of Technology, Seymour Benzer lab, with Pankaj Kapahi (2004–2009)
Portrait: UC San Diego (Interfaces Graduate Training Program)
Eating less without malnutrition lengthens life in many animals, and lower mTOR activity is one suspected reason. In 2009 Brian Zid, first author of a Cell paper with Pankaj Kapahi, showed in fruit flies that a restricted diet raises the level of 4E-BP, a protein that mTOR normally keeps switched off. 4E-BP shifted the cell's protein production toward messenger RNAs for mitochondrial parts, which raised mitochondrial activity, and flies without 4E-BP did not get the lifespan gain. It pinned one specific mTOR target to the benefit of eating less. The result is in flies.
Zid did this work at the California Institute of Technology in Seymour Benzer's lab. Zid was second author of the 2004 Current Biology paper that showed turning down the TOR pathway extends fly lifespan, and co-authored a 2009 study showing that the water content of fly food can confound dietary restriction experiments.
As a postdoc with Erin O'Shea at Harvard, Zid found that, in starving yeast, a gene's promoter sequence decides where its messenger RNA goes in the cytoplasm and how well it is translated (Nature, 2014). Zid now runs a lab in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC San Diego that studies how messenger RNAs are sorted and translated during stress, including how glucose starvation couples transcription to translation and how ribosomes sitting on the surface of mitochondria help import proteins into them.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | A | 4E-BP extends lifespan upon dietary restriction by enhancing mitochondrial activity in Drosophila ZID2009 First author: 4E-BP is needed for dietary restriction to extend fly lifespan and works by boosting translation of mitochondrial genes. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 2
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Brian M. Zid.
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- Pankaj Kapahi Showed that reducing TOR signalling extends fruit-fly lifespan, and that the translation repressor 4E-BP is needed for dietary restriction to extend it
- Seymour Benzer Pioneer of fine-structure gene mapping in phage and founder of neurogenetics, whose Drosophila work found the first circadian-rhythm mutants
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