Prof. Dr. Andrew Plested
The main interest of the Cellular Biophysics Group are the fast excitatory synapses that are massively abundant in the vertebrate brain. These synapses are important for normal brain functions like perception, cognition and memory. For these reasons and more, they develop techniques to examine the biophysical and structural properties of glutamate receptors, the enzymes that modify them and also the dynamics of glutamate itself, in isolated preparations and also in the context of the living brain.
- Patch clamp electrophysiology
- Brain slice recording
- Single channel recording
- Fluorescence imaging
- Molecular dynamics
- Protein biochemistry
- Single molecule TIRF
- Unnatural amino acid mutagenesis
Current position
| 2017 - present | Full Professor of Cellular Biophysics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (DE) |
Positions held
| 2008 - 2017 | Junior Group Leader at the FMP Berlin (DE) and member of the Cluster of Excellence NeuroCure |
| 2005 - 2008 | Postdoctoral Researcher at the National Institutes of Health (US) |
| 2003 - 2005 | Postdoctoral researcher at University College London (UK) |
Academic Education
| 1998 - 2002 | Doctoral Degree in Molecular Biosciences at Imperial College London (UK) |
| 1994 - 1998 | Master’s Degree in Physics at Imperial College London (UK) |
Honors/Awards/Fellowships
| 2018 | Gary Price Memorial Lecture, British Pharmacological Society |
| 2017 | DFG Heisenberg Professorship |
| 2016 | Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship - declined |
| 2015 | Visiting Scholar, Initiative d’Excellence, University of Bordeaux (FR) |
| 2015 | ERC Consolidator Grant |
| 2008 | Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship - declined |
| 2008 | MRC Career Development Award - declined |
| 2008 | Fellows award in research excellence, NIH (US) |
DFG-funded projects
| 2008 - present | EXC 258/2049 - 'NeuroCure' |
| 2017 - 2024 | FOR 2518 - 'FOR 2518: Functional dynamics of ion channels and transporters - DynIon' |
| 2019 - 2023 | Major Instrumentation Initiatives - 'A modular dual 2-photon microscope for multimodal optogenetics, synapse biophysics and beyond' |
| 2017 - 2022 | Heisenberg Professorship - 'Excitatory synapses: from structural biology to optical control' |
| 2016 - 2020 | TRR 186 - 'Molecular Switches: Spatio-temporal Control of Cellular Signal Transmission' |
| 2015 - 2018 | Research Grant - 'Optical control of glutamate receptors using genetically encoded unnatural amino acids' |
| 2010 - 2015 | Research Grant - 'Trapping the activation mechanism of AMPA-type glutamate receptors' |
Selected activities
| 2023 - present | Councillor, Society of General Physiologists |
| 2014 - 2020 | Editorial Board, Biophysical Journal |
| 2011 - 2015 | Executive Editor, Neuropharmacology |
Selected publications
- Lučić I, Héluin L, Jiang PL, Castro Scalise AG, Wang C, Franz A, Heyd F, Wahl MC, Liu F, Plested AJR. CaMKII autophosphorylation can occur between holoenzymes without subunit exchange. Elife. 2023 Aug 11;12:e86090. doi: 10.7554/eLife.86090.
- Hao Y, Toulmé E, König B, Rosenmund C, Plested AJR. Targeted sensors for glutamatergic neurotransmission. Elife. 2023 Jan 9;12:e84029. doi: 10.7554/eLife.84029. PMID: 36622100; PMCID: PMC9917459.
- Pampaloni NP, Riva I, Carbone AL, Plested AJR. Slow AMPA receptors in hippocampal principal cells. Cell Rep. 2021 Aug 3;36(5):109496. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109496.
- Biedermann J, Braunbeck S, Plested AJR, Sun H. Nonselective cation permeation in an AMPA-type glutamate receptor. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Feb 23;118(8):e2012843118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2012843118.
- Poulsen MH, Poshtiban A, Klippenstein V, Ghisi V, Plested AJR. Gating modules of the AMPA receptor pore domain revealed by unnatural amino acid mutagenesis. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Jul 2;116(27):13358-13367. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1818845116.
- Yu A, Salazar H, Plested AJR, Lau AY. Neurotransmitter Funneling Optimizes Glutamate Receptor Kinetics. Neuron. 2018 Jan 3;97(1):139-149.e4. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2017.11.024.