John G. Albeck
Measures mTORC1, AMPK and other metabolic signals in single living cells, following how they change over minutes and hours
Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California, Davis · PhD, Computational and Systems Biology, MIT (2007)
Albeck Lab, UC Davis (Davis, California, USA) ↗
Portrait: UC Davis
John Albeck earned his PhD in computational and systems biology at MIT in 2007 and joined the University of California, Davis in 2013. His lab builds fluorescent reporters and imaging pipelines that follow cell signalling in individual living cells over time, instead of averaging a whole dish into one number.
For mTOR, that approach showed that mTORC1–TFEB signalling in single cells adjusts continuously to amino acids and insulin, fluctuating together with AMPK and AKT as nutrient levels shift. The lab has also built biosensors for AMPK, the cell's energy sensor, so that several metabolic signals can be imaged in the same cell at once.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | M | Continuous sensing of nutrients and growth factors by the mTORC1-TFEB axis SPA2023 Senior author: live single-cell imaging showing mTORC1–TFEB signalling adjusts continuously to amino acids and insulin. |