Welcome to new MRC PPU PI, Adrien Rousseau

Adrien Rousseau
Adrien Rousseau

Adrien Rousseau has opened a new laboratory in the MRC PPU to investigate signalling pathways controlling proteasome homeostasis.

A major goal of Adrien’s laboratory will be to unravel the crosstalk between protein phosphorylation and ubiquitin proteasomal degradation pathways. The aim is to better understand how cells prevent accumulation of unfolded, misfolded, or damaged proteins that is deleterious and an underlying cause of various age-related diseases, including cancers and neurodegenerative disorders.

Adrien was brought up in France, and obtained his Master’s degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Strasbourg in 2009. He then went on to do a PhD in Molecular and Cellular aspect of Biology in the laboratory of Dr Marie-Christine Rio and Dr Catherine Tomasetto at the Institut de génétique et de biologie moléculaire et cellulaire (IGBMC) in France, where Adrien worked on the role of the Tumor necrosis factor Receptor-Associated Factor 4 (TRAF4) in breast cancer.

In 2013 Adrien moved to Cambridge (UK) and the laboratory of Dr. Anne Bertolotti at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he was awarded an EMBO long-term fellowship (2014-2016) and an EMBO advance fellowship (2017) to work on the regulation of proteasome assembly under stressful conditions. During this period Adrien identified an evolutionarily conserved pathway controlling proteasome homeostasis, with TORC1 inhibition inducing the levels of 19S regulatory particle assembly chaperones and the assembly of the 26S proteasome under stressful conditions. Downstream of TORC1 inhibition, the kinase Mpk1 orchestrates the inductions of RACs and proteasome assembly.

To learn more about Adrien’s research please click here. Adrien is also looking for a PhD student and Postdoc; please email Adrien if you wish to find out more about these positions (a.rousseau@dundee.ac.uk).

Principal Investigator