Peter Jackson

Peter K Jackson, PhD, Professor, Department of Microbiology & Immunology - Baxter Laboratory, Stanford University School of Medicine

Research Description: The Jackson Lab studies signaling pathways with relevance to human disease. They use a combination of high-throughput screening and profiling and proteomics approaches as well as a wide range of biochemical, genetic, and molecular techniques. They focus on identifying novel pathways and components, as well as elucidating their mechanism of action. One of the directions the Jackson lab aims to further understand what signals and pathways initiate adipogenesis, including their recent discovery of the omega-3 fatty acid receptor FFAR4 as a driver of preadipocyte differentiation. They are also studying the epigenetic and proteogenomic changes that allow the pre-adipocyte to become a mature, lipid-laden fat cell. To achieve this, they employ a mixture of multi-omics techniques with molecular and biochemical follow-up experiments. Since pre-adipocyte are uniformly ciliated and the primary cilium is required for adipogenesis, they are particularly interested in uncovering how this organelle functions during differentiation. Does the cilium display any anti- or pro-adipogenic receptors? Does ciliary signaling activate known adipogenic transcription factors? And finally, are primary cilium and ciliary proteins markers for the progenitor state and adipogenic potential? More recently work has found that FFAR4 and primary cilia are also critical for secretion of insulin and glucagon in endocrine pancreas, which is uniformly ciliated. They find that ciliary GPCRs like FFAR4 and the PGE2 receptor PTGER4 work through ciliary cAMP to stimulate GSIS in beta cell and GSGS in alpha cells.

Selected relevant publications (SDRC members in BOLD):

  1. Lee IT, Nakayama T, Wu CT, et al, Nolan GP, Nayak JV, Jackson PK. ACE2 localizes to the respiratory cilia and is not increased by ACE inhibitors or ARBs. Nat Commun. 2020 Oct 28;11(1):5453. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-19145-6. PMID: 33116139. 

  2. Hilgendorf KI, Johnson CT, Mezger A, Rice SL, Norris AM, Demeter J, Greenleaf WJ, Reiter JF, Kopinke D, Jackson PK. Omega-3 Fatty Acids Activate Ciliary FFAR4 to Control Adipogenesis. Cell. 2019 Nov 27;179(6):1289-1305.e21. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2019.11.005. PMID: 31761534; PMCID: PMC7332222. 

  3. Wu CT, Hilgendorf KI, Bevacqua RJ, Hang Y, Demeter J, Kim SK, Jackson PK. Discovery of ciliary G protein-coupled receptors regulating pancreatic islet insulin and glucagon secretion.   bioRxiv 2020.10.21.349423; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.21.349423.