Today, when Reinhard Jahn, professor of neurobiology and director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, gives the annual Kavli Distinguished Lecture at the Yale School of Medicine, it will be a reunion of sorts.
Though Jahn has lived and worked in his home country of Germany since 1997, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale in the 1980s and, later, a professor pharmacology and cell biology and an associate Howard Hughes Investigator, also at Yale.
Jahn is now a world leader in studying the cell biology of the synapse, the junction between neurons. Synapses are where electrical impulses generated in a nerve cell body are converted into chemical signals that relay that impulse to a neighbouring cell.
During his career, Jahn has characterized many of the molecular components of synaptic vesicles, bubble-like structures that transport those chemical signals, known as neurotransmitters, from place to place. Synaptic vesicles bud from a precursor membrane and are transported to their destination membrane where they dock and fuse. Jahn has helped elucidate the underlying mechanisms, specifically how synaptic vesicle fuse, as well as how neurotransmitters are loaded into vesicles.
Jahn’s Kavli Distinguished Lecture is entitled "Membrane Targeting and Fusion in the Secretory Pathway: Lessons from functional reconstitution,” and will take place on Monday, November 20, at 4 p.m. in room N107 of The Anlyan Center. He will discuss his research on SNAREs, a family of evolutionarily controlled proteins involved in vesicle fusion and targeting, using artificial membranes and artificial vesicles.
The Kavli Distinguished Lecture is supported by the Department of Neuroscience and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale, which was endowed by The Kavli Foundation in 2004. Past Kavli Distinguished Lecturers have included Christof Koch, president and chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and Svante Paabo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.