Christopher Potter
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
Insects find food, mates and places to lay eggs largely by smell and taste. Mosquitoes use the same senses to locate and bite people, and crop pests use them to find plants.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biophysics
Biology
- Topics
chemosensory ionotropic receptors
Ir8a
Ir25a
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Develop methods to harvest functional Ir8a chemosensory receptor complexes directly from roughly 10 million antennae of transgenic Drosophila expressing an EGFP-tagged Ir8a co-receptor.
- Purify EGFP:Ir8a complexes from fly tissue using nanobodies that bind EGFP, then determine their structures by cryo-electron microscopy to reveal architecture and subunit stoichiometry.
- Test whether Drosophila tissue can serve as a general in vivo source for purifying chemosensory receptor complexes that do not assemble properly in cultured cells.
- Use the resulting structures to infer how chemosensory ionotropic receptors evolved from ionotropic glutamate receptors to be gated by a wide variety of chemicals.
More about the research
Because of this, the receptors that detect chemicals on insect sensory neurons are attractive targets for controlling insect behavior. Insects use three receptor families for this, and one of them, the chemosensory ionotropic receptors or IRs, is among the most ancient and widespread chemical sensors on the planet. IRs apparently diverged roughly 600 million years ago from ionotropic glutamate receptors, channels that normally respond to the neurotransmitter glutamate, and took on new jobs detecting a wide variety of chemicals. No one has yet seen what a chemosensory IR looks like.
Why it matters
Mosquitoes rely on smell receptors that detect acidic odors from humans to find people to bite, and invasive pests rely on chemical senses to find crops. Knowing the three-dimensional structure of these ionotropic receptor complexes could support new strategies that target them to reduce mosquito biting and protect crops.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Edward Twomey
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biophysics
Determine how AMPA receptors, glutamate-activated channels that carry fast signals between neurons, open and close on a millisecond timescale, using time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy that captures rapid structural snapshots.
Anupama Dahanukar
University of California-Riverside, CA·Neuroscience
Identify genes that reduce responses of bitter, deterrent taste neurons to noni fatty acids in Drosophila sechellia, testing candidate Gustatory receptors, Odorant-binding proteins and Ionotropic receptors.
Duane McKenna
University of Memphis, TN·Ecology & Evolution
Reconstruct the first comprehensive phylogeny of longhorned beetles using more than 500 nuclear genes from over 600 species, collected by anchored hybrid enrichment sequencing and supported by genomes of key species.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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