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My name is Johannes Hill.
I am Professor of
Pharmacology at
University of California, Davis.
In addition, I'm vice chair of
pharmacology for
academic development,
the Departmental Mentoring
Director and the director
of our NH funded T32 training
program in pharmacology.
This training program focuses
on drug discovery
and development.
PSD-95, is one of the most
critical structural proteins
that organizes the
postsynaptic site
of synopsis in some
mammalian brain.
This presentation will provide
an in-depth overview of its
structure and function,
starting with the
discovery that it
interacts with postsynaptic
glutamate receptors.
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My research interests
are focused
on the structural and functional
organizational of the
postsynaptic site
of glutamatergic synopsis.
We use biochemistry, including
structural analysis of proteins,
cell biology including
super-resolution microscopy.
Electrophysiology
including recording of
excitatory postsynaptic
currents or EPCs,
mini EPCs in single channels.
Behavior analysis,
which includes
memory and attention testing.
Framing key findings in
historical and
methodological context will
elucidate the discovery process
for people new to this field,
and perhaps makes
this presentation
inspiring and informative,
especially for my
younger colleagues.
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Here's an overview of
the learning goals.
First, I will introduce
the basics of
neurotransmission and
glutamate receptors.
Then I will provide an overview
of some earlier work that
defined interactions of PSD-95
with glutamate receptors.
This overview will be
followed by a detailed
description of
the structural
aspects of binding of
the PDZ domains of PSD-95
to its target proteins.
These details remain highly
relevant and are widely
applicable to literally
hundreds of such interactions.
These biochemical aspects
will be followed by
the description of
how PSD-95 itself is
anchored at postsynaptic
sites and then up out
some specific functions of
PSD-95 beyond glutamate
receptor functions.
There is a second separate
talk that is focused on
the structural aspects of
the PDZ domain interactions.
As typical for
Henry Stewart talks,
most details are taken
from my own work,
but I will supplement with
some additional work by
others and provide appropriate
citations when indicated.
