Dr. Richard Aldrich
Office: NMS 5.104A
phone: 232-6246
email:
Richard Aldrich graduated with high distinction from the University of Arizona in 1975 with a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Biological Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University in 1980, after which he did postdoctoral work at Yale University in Physiology. He joined the faculty at Yale in the Section of Molecular Neurobiology before returning to Stanford in 1985 as a faculty member in the Department of Neurobiology and subsequently the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, where he served as department chair from 2001-2004. Dr. Aldrich was a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1990 until moving to The University of Texas in 2006, where he is Professor and Chair of the Section of Neurobiology in the School of Biological Sciences and the Karl Folkers Chair II in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research. He has served on the council and as president of the Society of General Physiologists, and on the council and is a Fellow of the Biophysical Society.
Research Interests
Ion channels are the molecular units of electrical signaling in cells. They are proteins that regulate the movement of ions—such as sodium, calcium, and potassium—into and out of cells. They are responsible for the conversion of external sensory signals to the electrical language of the nervous system and for the integration of these signals to generate appropriate behavior. Ion channels are also important for the generation and regulation of the heartbeat, for contraction of muscles, and for the release of hormones in the bloodstream. The body contains a large variety of ion channel types, specialized to select for certain species of ions and to selectively open and close in response to a number of different stimuli, such as the binding of a neurotransmitter molecule or a change in the voltage that exists across a cell's membrane. Work in the Aldrich laboratory is directed towards understanding the mechanisms of ion channel function and the role of ion channels in electrical signaling and physiology. This research relates to transduction, processing, and transmission of information in the nervous other physiological systems and to basic mechanisms of coupled conformational changes in signaling proteins. We use a combination of molecular biology, electrophysiology, biophysics, cellular and systems physiology, and computational biology.
Recently we have focused on the mechanisms of gating and the physiological roles of voltage- and calcium-activated (BK) potassium channels. These ion channels proteins are important in excitable and nonexcitable cells of a very wide range of physiological systems. BK channels are also an outstanding model system for the study of regulated conformational changes in proteins due to their dual activation (by membrane voltage and by calcium binding) and their particular suitability for high-resolution functional manipulation and measurements, including high quality single molecule studies. The broad role of these channels in several tissues provides a rich environment for studying their involvement in cellular and systemic physiological mechanisms. Our work on these channels has been a combination of biophysical studies directed towards understanding the mechanisms of channel gating and transgenic and physiological studies directed towards understanding their role in physiological systems.