The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Roderick MacKinnon, M.D., John D. Rockefeller Jr. Professor, and head, Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics, The Rockefeller University; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

Life has evolved a marvelous electrical system that underlies our ability to detect sensory stimuli, to move, to think. The system’s fundamental molecular components, the ion channels, are membrane‐embedded proteins that catalyze the selective flow of ions into and out of cells. Potassium ion channels are the major regulators of a cell’s electrical activity, serving to set the threshold for electrical signal initiation and to terminate the signal at the
appropriate time. The impressive diversity of potassium channels allows the electrical system to be responsive to many aspects of a cell’s metabolic state. On March 1, Dr. Roderick MacKinnon will speak on potassium channels, addressing how their conduction pathway selects potassium and how membrane voltage, signaling lipids, G‐proteins and the mechanical state of the cell membrane control their gates to fulfill essential needs of living cells.

Dr. MacKinnon shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking discoveries about the architecture and function of ion channels. He joined the Rockefeller faculty in 1996, with the goal of using X‐ray crystallography to decipher the three‐dimensional structure of a potassium‐conducting ion channel. Contrary to all expectations, he and his colleagues succeeded in less than two years — a feat widely heralded as a scientific milestone. His ongoing studies of ion‐channel structure and function, recently extended to channels from mammalian cells, are providing insights that may be key to developing new therapeutics for a broad range of disorders, including epilepsy, diabetes, heart arrhythmias and asthma.

Dr. MacKinnon received a B.A. from Brandeis University and an M.D. from the Tufts University School of Medicine. After an internship and residency at Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School, he returned to basic science at Brandeis, where he began teasing apart the ion channel’s essential components. He continued this work as a professor in the department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and subsequently at Rockefeller, where he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1997. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. MacKinnon has received many other honors, including the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award, the Gairdner Foundation International Award and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Gloria Phipps

Phone

(212) 327-8967

Sponsor

Gloria Phipps
(212) 327-8967
phippsg@rockefeller.edu