Min Peng
Immunologist at Tsinghua University who, as a postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering, identified Sestrins and SZT2 as brakes on mTORC1 and now studies how T cells grow, specialise and remember
Tenured Associate Professor, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University (since 2024) · Associate Professor (2023–2024) and Assistant Professor (2017–2023), Tsinghua University · Research Fellow and Research Associate, Immunology Program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (2010–2017) · PhD in Immunology, Peking Union Medical College (2010)
Peng Lab, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) ↗
Min Peng is first author of an Atlas study (PEN2017) about how cells tell mTORC1, the growth-control complex, that amino acids are scarce. Two protein complexes on the lysosome do this job: GATOR1 switches mTORC1 off, and GATOR2 holds GATOR1 back. The paper showed that a large protein called SZT2 pulls GATOR1 and GATOR2 together into one complex on the lysosome surface. Cells without SZT2 kept mTORC1 switched on even when starved of amino acids, and mice lacking SZT2 died soon after birth. The work, in cells and mice, added SZT2 to the list of parts that let mTORC1 sense nutrients.
Peng studied clinical medicine at Sichuan University and earned a PhD in immunology at Peking Union Medical College in 2010. From 2010 to 2017 Peng worked in the Immunology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, in the group of Ming Li, the senior author of the Atlas paper. There Peng also showed that Sestrin proteins act on the Rag GTPases to hold mTORC1 down (Cell, 2014).
In 2017 Peng started a lab at the School of Medicine of Tsinghua University in Beijing and became a tenured associate professor in 2024. The lab studies how T cells, the white blood cells that kill infected and cancerous cells, are activated, divide, specialise and form memory, including the role of metabolism in these steps. It continues the mTOR thread: a 2022 paper from the lab showed that SZT2 keeps blood stem cells in balance by tuning mTORC1 to nutrients. The lab also develops engineered T cell therapies, including a T cell state it calls TIF that can renew itself for a long time while keeping its function.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | M | SZT2 dictates GATOR control of mTORC1 signalling PEN2017 First author: showed that SZT2 links GATOR1 and GATOR2 on the lysosome so that mTORC1 shuts off when amino acids run low. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Min Peng.
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- Ming O. Li An immunologist who studies how tumors trigger immune responses and who found that SZT2 organizes the GATOR complexes controlling mTORC1.
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