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
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| 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. |
| 2025 | M | Transient APC/C inactivation by mTOR boosts glycolysis during cell cycle entry PAU2025 After mitogen stimulation, mTOR quickly phosphorylates the APC/C adaptor CDH1, partly releasing it and briefly inactivating APC/C; the glycolytic enzyme PFKFB3 accumulates and glycolysis rises, until a delayed phosphatase restores APC/C. This incoherent feed-forward loop produces a pulse of glycolysis that cell cycle entry requires. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 3
People with a profile here who share at least one study with John G. Albeck.
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- Breanne Sparta Quantitative cell biologist who trained in John Albeck's lab at UC Davis, where live single-cell imaging showed that the mTORC1-TFEB signalling axis tracks nutrients and growth factors continuously, and then moved to UCLA as a postdoctoral fellow
- Debasish Paul Postdoctoral fellow in Steven Cappell's lab at the National Cancer Institute who studies how ubiquitin ligases time the start of the cell cycle, and who found that mTOR briefly switches off the APC/C to give cells a burst of glycolysis as they start to divide
- Steven D. Cappell Studies how single cells commit to dividing; showed that mTOR briefly switches off the APC/C to give cells a pulse of glycolysis at cell cycle entry
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