John J.m. Bergeron

Biography

Dr. Bergeron has studied polypeptide hormone and growth factor receptor activation and signaling, and especially the spatial and temporal regulation of hormone and growth factor action in target organs. He has also studied extensively the fundamental mechanisms for secretion of N linked glycoproteins from all eukaryotic cells through mechanistic studies on the protein calnexin which he uncovered. Dr. Bergeron is an expert on high throughput approaches and especially organellar proteomics and is a co-founder with Tom Hudson of the McGill University/Genome Quebec Innovation Centre and co-founder of Caprion Proteomics. Dr. Bergeron is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and McLaughlin gold medal awardee of the Royal Society of Canada. Dr. Bergeron was also honored with the Human Proteome Organization Discovery Award.

Research Interest

Organs including those of the endocrine system have evolved to regulate homeostasis, and insults either through the environment or the genetic complement of the family will lead to disease. My lab studies quantitatively the proteins in human and animal organs to uncover their functions in health and disease. The strategy is based on a technology we have named as the Protein Microscope. By the assiduous processing of samples from human and model organisms, we have characterized proteins within organelles (small intracellular compartments responsible for cell homeostasis) isolated from organs (liver, pancreas, islets of Langerhans, testis, epididymis) linked to health and disease. This has already enabled the assignment of proteins to mechanisms fundamental to homeostasis and proteins linked to organelles in organ samples from humans with disease. Our ultimate goal is the assignment of all predicted 20,000 human protein coding genes to the cognate organelles of the >250 different cell types making up the organs of the human to define a cell map and thereby uncover the mechanistic basis of health and disease.