Description:

The Department of Pharmacology eagerly invites you to attend an upcoming seminar, to be presented by Paul G. DeCaen, Ph.D. Dr. DeCaen is presently a Postdoctoral Fellow from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Cardiology, Boston Children's Hospital, as well as Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School.

The following, is an overview of this seminar, as described by Dr. DeCaen:

“Polycystic kidney disease proteins (PKDs) are members of the Transient receptor potential (TRP) family of Ca2+-permeant ion channels that populate the membrane of primary cilia. A primary cilium is a solitary, non-motile protuberance from apical side of polarized cells. To advance our understanding of cilia PKD channels, we made cilia-specific fluorophores which enabled electrophysiological recordings of ion channels in the cilia membrane and which detect calcium changes in the ciliary compartment. These results (published last year) genetically identified a heteromeric PKD channel (PKD1-L1 and PKD2-L1) from the cilia of several non-renal tissues and established a high resting calcium [700 nM] concentration within this organelle. We are now poised to demine the why PKD2 mutations can cause Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease and their function in the collecting duct."