Ming O. Li
An immunologist who studies how tumors trigger immune responses and who found that SZT2 organizes the GATOR complexes controlling mTORC1.
David H. Koch Chair in Immunologic Studies and Professor, Immunology Program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center · PhD, Columbia University
Portrait: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Ming Li leads a lab in the Immunology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he holds the David H. Koch Chair in Immunologic Studies. His group studies the cellular and molecular basis of immune responses to tumors, aiming for treatments based on those mechanisms.
In the 2017 Nature paper in this Atlas, his lab looked at how cells sense nutrients to control mTORC1. They showed that a protein called SZT2, which is mutated in a form of epilepsy, pulls the GATOR1 and GATOR2 complexes together at the lysosome. Cells lacking SZT2 kept mTORC1 switched on even when starved, and mice lacking it died soon after birth.
The work showed that GATOR1 and GATOR2 need SZT2 to read amino acid levels properly, and it linked an epilepsy gene to the mTORC1 pathway.
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 Senior author of the study showing that SZT2 assembles GATOR1 and GATOR2 into a lysosomal complex needed to switch mTORC1 off during nutrient deprivation; SZT2-deficient mice died as newborns. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 1
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Ming O. Li.
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- 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
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