Karen’s mTOR structure review is out! [COSTBI]

We are celebrating the first review paper from our one and only — Karen Linde-Garelli — in Current Opinion in Structural Biology.

Karen is a Stanford Cancer Biology PhD student in the Rogala Lab, where she is studying nutrient sensing and trafficking on the lysosomal surface.

Karen and Kacper wrote a review that talks about structural biology discoveries in the mTOR field — spanning the last 10 years. They mined the entire Protein Data Bank to ensure that every single paper that has deposited structural coordinates of a protein from the mTOR pathway is cited.

The review is split into major sections, where Karen and Kacper discuss:
– Structure of the mTOR kinase and its associated complexes 1 and 2
– Substrate recognition and regulation mechanisms by mTORC1 and mTORC2
– The mode of operation of mTORC1 on the lysosomal surface
– How various modalities contribute to sensing of the environment by the mTOR pathway.

Our lab received a kind invitation to write this review from Prof. Simon Newstead (Oxford) and Prof. Robert Tampé (Goethe University Frankfurt), who were guest editors of an issue that focused on structural biology of proteins that work in the context of biological membranes. Please see the whole Membranes (2023) issue here, and the editorial by Simon and Robert here.