Subsequent projects
Prof. Dr. Martin Lohse
University of Würzburg
Chair of Pharmacology
Prof. Dr. Brian Kobilka
Stanford University
Kobilka Lab
The minimal receptor signaling unit
Receptors are the prime targets of therapeutic drugs, and are therefore of utmost interest for biomedical studies as well as clinical practice. About a third of all therapeutic drugs target receptors, e.g. betablockers, antihistamines, opiate pain killers, but also the recently hyped antidiabetic drugs that induce weight loss. Whereas textbooks say that signaling by such receptors is uniform across an entire cell, our recent data indicate that signaling by a single receptor is physiologically limited to a very small region in a cell, with a radius of only 30-60 nm. In this collaborative project we aim to define these regions as the minimal receptor signaling unit, and to characterize their temporal and spatial dimensions. We will also investigate their composition, i.e. the question, which proteins are found within these minute regions, and whether distinct types of such signaling units may exist for an individual receptor, and whether the proteins involved change over time.
Primary project: Mechanisms of receptor activation