Erica Pledger

Researcher in Jamie Cate's lab at UC Berkeley who used ribosome profiling to show that exhausted human T cells shut down a key class of growth-related mRNAs even while mTOR is active

Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley (Cate lab, papers 2025–2026)

Erica Pledger was first author of a 2026 RNA Biology paper in this Atlas (PLEDGER2026), first posted as a preprint in 2025. CD8+ T cells are the immune cells that kill infected and cancer cells. When they are stimulated for too long, for example inside a tumour, they become exhausted and stop working well. The team made human CD8+ T cells exhausted in the dish and used ribosome profiling, a method that shows which messenger RNAs are actually being read by ribosomes, to see what proteins the cells were making.

One group of messages stood out: 5' TOP mRNAs, which code for ribosome parts and other protein-making machinery. Their translation is normally switched on by mTORC1, the growth-control complex. In exhausted T cells these messages were strongly held back even though mTOR activity was high, which points to a second layer of control that overrides or bypasses mTOR. The work was done in cultured human cells, not in patients.

Pledger works in Jamie Cate's lab at UC Berkeley, which studies how ribosomes and the initiation factor eIF3 decide which mRNAs are made into protein. PubMed lists two papers with Pledger's name, the preprint and the published version.

Milestones in the Atlas

A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.

Co-authors in the Atlas 1

Every researcher with a profile →

← All researchers