Biophysical Society Bulletin | February 2022

Biophysicist in Profile

Gail Robertson Area of Research: Biogenesis, biophysical properties, and physiological roles of ion channels

Institution University of Wisconsin-Madison

At-a-Glance

Gail Robertson grew up in the small town of Libby, Montana. She recalls, “My family lived there until I was 11, when, driven by upward mobility and my parents’ wish for a better future for the kids, we moved to a city where the kids could work a job, live at home, and pay tuition to an excellent state university, preferably graduating as engineers. Hence, we lived first in St. Paul, Minnesota, where my three older siblings graduated from ‘The U,’ and then in Williamsville, New York, where I finished high school and went to SUNY Buffalo. I know my parents were right to promote our education, but my longing for the profound natural beauty of Montana has never abated.”

Gail Robertson

Gail Robertson , Kellett Professor in the Department of Neuro- science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and incoming Biophysical Society President, started university as an English major, pursuing her love of poetry. She quickly found that “there was an entire world in the countless courses offered and, in the ‘70s, very few requirements. While attending a weekly Neurobiology Colloquium with eight other students in my sophomore year, reading Hodgkin and Huxley and oth- er classics of neurophysiology, I realized I wanted to be an academic research scientist directing my own laboratory,” she shares. “I never wavered from that goal.” She attended Washington University for her graduate education, where she studied under “the indefatigable Paul S.G. Stein , who is now in his 51st year teaching his legend- ary physiology course to 300+ undergraduates! He was an attentive and dedicated mentor, despite raising two small children on his own,” she says. “In my studies I inferred the organization of central pattern generators underlying rhyth- mic limb movements by resolving the synaptic drive recorded with microelectrodes in motor neurons innervating the limb musculature. I often wondered about the mechanisms coor- dinating the expression of multiple ion channel types and the resulting firing patterns of the motor neuron.” She made the fortuitous decision in graduate school to take Physical Chemistry and the Membrane Biophysics course offered by Paul De Weer , Luis Reuss , and the late Bob Rakowski . “I felt at sea in the Membrane Biophysics class of 20, the only woman, and intimidated by the aggressive Socratic method that was the order of the day, but I ultimately excelled,” Rob- ertson notes. “I did not realize at the time that I would later, as an assistant professor, put those principles into action, characterizing the biophysical behavior of recently cloned channels. Despite my lack of formal training in a biophysics lab, the experience in that Membrane Biophysics course was crucial in providing the kernel of confidence I would need to tackle those projects as I set out on my own.”

Following completion of her PhD and based on her interest in the control of membrane conductances underlying com- plex behaviors, she was encouraged by a faculty member at Washington University to consider the emerging field of neurogenetics. Though she knew nothing of genetics, she was intrigued and joined the lab of Barry Ganetzky at the University of Wisconsin. “In the first lab meetings I felt I’d been dropped in a foreign country where no one spoke my language. For a time, I was the resident electrophysiologist in the lab, characterizing mutant phenotypes in various Drosophila preparations and learning how to set up genetic crosses,” she explains. “But mostly I received amazing training in molecular biology, ‘walking’ hundreds of kilobases along the chromo- some and screening cDNA libraries homemade from tens of thousands of fly heads. These efforts led to cloning the gene slowpoke ( slo ), encoding the first BK potassium channel.” “Another gene that emerged from the Ganetzky enterprise was ether-a-go-go and a related gene, hERG , cloned from human hippocampus. As an independent assistant professor, I decided to figure out the physiological function of the hERG gene, expressing it in Xenopus oocytes and then comparing the biophysical and pharmacological properties to native currents reported in the literature. This work was done to- gether with Matt Trudeau , my first graduate student and now a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine,” she says. “We found that hERG encoded the channels un- derlying I Kr , a repolarizing current in the heart and the target of acquired long QT syndrome. Craig January , Zhengfeng Zhou (now at Oregon Health & Science University), and I created a technology readily adopted by the pharmaceutical indus- try to counter-screen drugs in development for risk of the catastrophic arrhythmias associated with acquired long QT syndrome. Much of the rest of my career has focused on the hERG channel, although drug safety remains just one aspect of our research.”

February 2022

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