Krebs Lecture features inventor of novel molecular probes

Dr. Roger Y. Tsien will visit the UW this month as the Sterling Winthrop professor to present the 13th annual Edwin G. Krebs Lecture in Molecular Pharmacology. He will speak on “Genetically Encoded Indicators of Signal Transduction and Protein Interactions” Wednesday, June 7, at 3:30 p.m. in room T-625 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Pharmacology and is open to everyone.

Tsien, best known for inventing molecules that can be used inside cells to probe their signaling processes, is a professor of pharmacology and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. He is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He has been at UC San Diego since 1989, when he moved from the Department of Physiology-Anatomy at UC Berkeley.

He was born in New York City and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics from Harvard. He went to the University of Cambridge’s Physiological Laboratory on a Marshall Scholarship, earned his Ph.D. there in 1977 and remained in England until 1981, when he joined the faculty at Berkeley.

Tsien’s reserch has been at the interfaces between organic chemistry, cell biology and neurobiology, starting long before such interdisciplinary efforts became fashionable. His work designing and building molecules that either report on, or alter, signaling within living cells is widely known. This work began with his invention of highly fluorescent molecules to measure calcium levels within a cell and then was extended to molecular probes to study may other messengers and signaling processes within cells.

The “optical reporter” molecules, such as the fluorescent probes, are also valuable in screening of candidate drugs in pharmaceutical labs.

Tsien’s current research goals are to understand how signal transduction orchestrates complex cellular responses such as gene expression and the changability of nerve system synapses, called synaptic plasticity. These goals will require improved molecular techniques to see and manipulate small-molecule messengers, protein phosphorylation, and protein-protein interaction in live cells and organisms, according to Dr. William Catterall, chair of the UW Department of Pharmacology.

Dr. Edwin Krebs, for whom the lecture is named, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1992 with Dr. Edmond Fischer, UW professor emeritus of biochemistry. Krebs is UW professor emeritus of pharmacology and biochemistry. He is internationally renowned for his pioneering work in unraveling the complex pathways by which hormones and drugs regulate cellular function through protein phosphorylation.

Krebs first joined the School of Medicine faculty in 1948. He was chair of the Department of Pharmacology from 1977 until 1983. He has received many other honors for his fundamental work on protein kinases and their role in cellular regulation. ¶