Novel Chemical Tools to Study Ion Channel Biology

Christopher Ahern, PhD, is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa.  Dr. Ahern received his BS in Chemistry and PhD in Physiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He began working with genetic code expansion approaches during his post-doctoral studies with Dr. Richard Horn at Jefferson Medical College along with Drs. Henry Lester and Dennis Dougherty at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Ahern’s research laboratory has expressed a variety of channels with synthetic amino acids of their own design, and is developing new protocols to facilitate their expression in complex cell types.  Stephan A. Pless is an Associate Professor in the Center for Biopharmaceuticals, Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology, at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Dr. Pless completed his undergraduate degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Hamburg in Germany. He then obtained a PhD in molecular neuroscience with Dr. J. Lynch at the University of Queensland in Australia, before pursuing his postdoctoral studies with Drs. C. Ahern and H. Kurata at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Dr. Pless´ current research focuses on using a combination of electrophysiology, spectroscopy and synthetic amino acids to understand the molecular function and pharmacology of ligand-gated ion channels.

1 Introduction .-2 Engineered ionizable side chains .-3 Cysteine Modification: Probing Channel Structure, Function and Conformational Change .-4 Functional site-directed fluorometry .-5 Bioreactive Tethers .-6 Flipping the photoswitch: Ion channels under light control .-7 Incorporation of noncanonical amino acids.