Page 33 - CBAC Newsletter 2016

Then in college, where I studied physics, the book “What
Is Life” by Erwin Schroedinger led me to apply for the
biophysics graduate program.

When I entered the Ph.D. program in 1986, the first ion
channel had just been recently cloned. It was an excit-
ing time because the molecular identity of so many ion
channels was revealed at a rapid pace, and the new
knowledge provided great opportunities to study ion
channels in a much deeper and broader scale. What
attracted me the most was how these channels sense
physiological stimuli to open, a question that is still not
fully understood even today. My Ph.D. mentor, Dr. Ira
Cohen, inspired and encouraged me to learn molecular
biology of ion channels, which was new to his lab at the
time, and to try my own experiments. This experience
made me confident that I could do research to answer
my questions independently.

My post-doctoral training in Dr. Richard Aldrich’s lab at
Stanford University was important for my career. I learnt
to analyze the function of ion channels and correlate the
function with structure.

"I tell my children that my career will be a good one if
my research can directly benefit some real people"

I would say that wanting to know how things work, or make it an important ion channel in the function of the
curiosity, has been driving my research. Being on the heart. The potassium ion channel is called KCNQ1 and
faculty of an engineering department and more experi- the beta subunit is KCNE1. When KCNQ1 is associated
enced with research, I now pay more attention to how with KCNE1, all of its functional properties including its
my research can benefit other people’s research or life. current amplitude, voltage dependence, pharmacology
I tell my children that my career will be a good one if my and posttranslational modulation are changed
research can directly benefit some real people. drastically. The KCNQ1+KCNE1 channel complex actually
forms the IKs channel in the heart and these emerging
I hope that my next achievement is better than any properties due to KCNE1 association are important for
previous ones. But to answer this question of what is my the IKs channel to control heart rhythm. The question of
most important research achievement, I would like to how KCNE1 association causes such broad and drastic
mention one of our recent results: property changes has been studied for more than 16
years but no satisfactory answer was found.
The study was on how a beta subunit modulates a
potassium ion channel to change its properties and CBAC Center Heartbeat | 29