On September 10th, the Bonthuis lab took all its’ villainous members to Champaign-Urbana Adventures in Time and Space.  Our super-evil overlord tricked and betrayed his fellow villains and left us with only one hour and our wits to escape from the clutches of his trap and prevent our certain doom!  Is no super-evil overlord to be trusted?  Our logic skills were put to the test, but we escaped and saved ourselves just in the nick of time with only 6 minutes and 55 seconds to spare!  Our maniacal laughter filled the air upon our triumphant escape and proved that we would live to villain another day … and enjoy doing it.

Congratulations to Erin O’Leary on her 1st author publication covering her work as a technician in Dr. Gökhan Mutlu’s lab at the University of Chicago.

This work built on their previous findings that glycine is required for collagen synthesis in myofibroblasts. This paper sought to determine the role of ATF4 in this pathway. AFT4 is a regulator of amino acid metabolism. They found that primary driver of ATF4 downstream of TGF-β is activation of the Mechanistic Target of Rapamycin Complex 1 (mTORC1). They used a panel of mTOR inhibitors and found that Rapalink-1, which specifically targets the kinase domain of mTORC1, completely inhibited ATF4 induction and metabolic reprogramming downstream of TGF-β.

Publication

O’Leary, E. M., Tian, Y., Nigdelioglu, R., Witt, L. J., Cetin-Atalay, R., Meliton, A. Y., Woods, P. S., Kimmig, L. M., Sun, K. A., Gökalp, G. A., Mutlu, G. M., & Hamanaka, R. B. (2020). TGF-β Promotes Metabolic Reprogramming in Lung Fibroblasts via mTORC1-dependent ATF4 Activation. American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology.
DOI: 10.1165/rcmb.2020-0143OC, PMID: 32668192