Medway Café Scientifique © 2010 Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Site Map
Scientifique
Medway Café
Sponsored and organised by
Professor Alistair Mathie
Medway School of Pharmacy
Doors open at 6:45pm for a 7:30pm start
Innovation Centre Medway Phase 2
“Exciting Nerve Cells”
A remarkable range of animals (spiders, snakes, scorpions and puffer fish, to name just a few) produce venoms that can harm us. The venoms contain toxins which elicit their effects by acting on the main family of proteins (called ion channels) which underlie nerve cell communication. When they do this, these toxins block electrical signalling in neurons and can kill us. For a Research Scientist like Professor Mathie, this is not all bad news. He will show us that by understanding precisely how these toxins work, we can aim to harness the mechanism in the hope of
providing useful new therapies for a range of conditions such as epilepsy, stroke, neuropathic pain and depression. Furthermore a number of natural products isolated from plants, can also produce their effects through actions on neuronal ion channels.
A key question is whether we can learn things from these compounds in our quest for more effective therapies?
Biography
My PhD research at the University of Leicester (1981-1984) supervised by Asa Blakeley and Stewart Petersen, used intracellular electrophysiological recording techniques to study the electrical responses of sympathetically innervated smooth muscles, following neurotransmitter release at the neuroeffector junction. In particular, in work published in J Physiol and BJP, I investigated the role of presynaptic adrenoceptors and showed that these receptors have a physiological role as autoreceptors at the level of individual transmitter release sites.
Following my PhD, I spent five years in the laboratories of David Colquhoun and Stuart Cull-Candy at University College London (UCL) studying the biophysical properties of ligand- and voltage-gated ion channels in single, isolated mammalian neurons using patch-clamp and whole-cell electrophysiological recording techniques. For the majority of my time at UCL, I studied the detailed properties of neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in rat sympathetic ganglion cells and cultured bovine chromaffin cells. I was lead author of a number of key papers published in J Physiol and Proc Roy Soc B showing that these receptors display significant differences in their functional and pharmacological properties when compared with muscle type nicotinic receptors.
At the University of Washington in Seattle (1989-1991), in the laboratory of Bertil Hille, the major focus of my research was to apply my experience in electrophysiology to study the intracellular mechanisms activated by neurotransmitters which couple to G-proteins and how these can modulate the activity of voltage-gated ion channels over time scales ranging from milliseconds to hours. I was able to learn a great deal about these biochemical pathways and how to best study them. Together with two other postdoctoral scientists (David Beech and Laurent Bernheim), I published a series of important papers in PNAS and Neuron characterising the intracellular pathways that neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine and noradrenaline activate to modulate calcium and potassium channel activity in mammalian neurons.
I established my own laboratory in 1991, first at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine then, following merger, at UCL. In 1999, I moved my laboratory to Imperial College London when I took up a position there as Reader in Molecular Neuroscience. In 2007, my laboratory relocated again when I became Professor of Pharmacology, Head of Biological Sciences and Director of Research at the Medway School of Pharmacy, University of Kent.
