Programação
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Gina Yosten, PhD
Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO, USA.
Editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Physiology.
Dr. Gina Yosten is Associate Professor of Pharmacology at Saint Louis University.
She is also editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Physiology – Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, published by the American Physiological Society. She assumed her new duties in July 2020 as the first woman to serve in the post and also the youngest person to be named editor-in-chief. Dr. Yosten has been serving as associate editor of the journal.
Dr. Yosten was a postdoctoral fellow and a research assistant professor at Saint Louis University, before joining the tenure-track faculty in 2015. Her research is focused on the study of diabetes, neuroscience, and endocrinology.Dr. Yosten earned her bachelor’s degree in zoology at the University of Oklahoma, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Golden Key Society. After working for two years at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, she began graduate studies at Saint Louis University in 2006 and earned a doctorate in pharmacology and physiology in 2010.
G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the most abundant receptor family encoded by the human genome. They are involved in all aspects of mammalian cellular life, and are extraordinarily diverse both in terms of ligands and biological function. GPCRs can bind to peptides, lipids, and react to photons; and they play a role in various cellular and physiological processes, including cell motility, metabolism, and visual perception. In particular, GPCRs play essential roles in the central nervous system, including neurotransmission and neuronal metabolism, as well as in energy homeostasis, including modulation of insulin signaling and glucose metabolism. Within the GPCR superfamily is a subgroup of GPCRs, identified by molecular cloning and bioinformatics, for which the ligands are unknown.
Dr Yosten has developed a simple, yet effective strategy that utilizes a combination of in vitro pharmacology, molecular biology, and bioinformatics, to match these “orphan” GPCRs with their cognate ligands. Using this strategy, she has matched two orphan GPCRs with their ligands–GPR107 with the neuropeptide neuronostatin, and GPR146 with the connecting peptide, or C-peptide, of pro-insulin.
Her overall goals are to 1) evaluate the roles of GPCRs in diabetes-associated microvascular dysfunction, and 2) understand the roles of GPCRs in the central circuits underlying obesity-associated hypertension.