Bart Pederson , PhD

Research Interests

My laboratory is broadly interested in glucose metabolism. Specifically, we are studying the role of the storage form of glucose, glycogen, in various tissues.

We have mice genetically engineered to lack or overaccumulate glycogen in several tissues. We are studying these animals to better understand the importance of glycogen in organ development and function, as well as in diseases such as diabetes and epilepsy.

Representative publications:

1. Pederson, B.A., Chen, H., Schroeder, J.M., Shou, W., Depaoli-Roach, A.A., Roach, P.J. (2004) Abnormal cardiac development in the absence of heart glycogen. Mol.Cell. Biol. 24, 7179-7187. ystem without microsomal membrane permeabilization. Arch. Biochem. Biophys., 357, 173-177


2. Pederson, B.A., Cope, C.R., Schroeder, J.M., Smith, M.W., Irimia, J.M., Thurberg, B.L., Depaoli-Roach, A.A., Roach, P.J. (2005) Exercise capacity of mice genetically lacking muscle glycogen synthase: In mice, muscle glycogen is not essential for exercise. J. Biol. Chem. 280, 17260-17265.


3. Pederson, B.A., Cope, C.R., Irimia, J.M., Schroeder, J.M., Thurberg, B.L., Depaoli-Roach, A.A., Roach, P.J. (2005) Mice with elevated muscle glycogen stores do not have improved exercise performance. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 331, 491-496.


4. Pederson, B.A., Schroeder, J.M., Parker, G.E., Smith, M.W., Depaoli-Roach, A.A., Roach, P.J. (2005) Glucose metabolism in mice lacking muscle glycogen synthase. Diabetes ,54, 3466-3373.


5. Savage, D.B., Zhai, L., Ravikumar, B., Choi, C.S., Snaar, JEM., Medina-Gomez, G. Kim, S., McGuire, A.C., Wou, S-E., Bock, C.B., Evans, R.M., Vidal-Puig, A., Barroso, I., Shulman, G.U., Karpe, F., Taylor, R., Pederson, B.A., Roach, P.J., O’Rahilly, S., DePaoli-Roach, A.A. (2008) A prevalent variant in PPP1R3A impairs glycogen synthesis and reduces muscle glycogen content in humans and mice. PLOS-Medicine. 5, e2. PMC2214798