Xizi Chen

Structural biologist in Yanhui Xu's group at Fudan University who was first author of the 2018 cryo-EM structure of human mTORC2 and co-first author of an earlier structure of human mTORC1

Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center and Institutes of Biomedical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai (papers 2016–2018, at the time of the study)

Xizi Chen was first author of the 2018 Cell Research paper (CHE2018) that gave the first close look at human mTORC2, the second of the two mTOR complexes. The team used cryo-electron microscopy, which freezes purified proteins in thin ice and builds a 3D model from many thousands of images, and reached 4.9 angstrom resolution. The complex is a hollow, diamond-like shape in which two copies of mTOR form the scaffold. The partner proteins Rictor and mSin1 sit right next to the spot where the drug rapamycin would bind. They block it, which explains at the level of shape why rapamycin hits mTORC1 but not mTORC2.

The structure also showed that Rictor and Raptor, the defining partner of mTORC1, use overlapping contacts on mTOR, so a single mTOR cannot belong to both complexes at once. These are results from purified human proteins, not from cells or animals.

Two years earlier Chen was one of four co-first authors of a 4.4 angstrom cryo-EM structure of human mTORC1 in Protein & Cell. The paper credits Chen with purifying the protein, running biochemical tests and helping with crosslinking mass spectrometry. Both papers came from Yanhui Xu's laboratory at Fudan University in Shanghai, in collaboration with Hong-Wei Wang's cryo-EM group at Tsinghua University. A current position could not be confirmed.

Milestones in the Atlas

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Co-authors in the Atlas 1

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