The final seminar of the academic year 2022-2023, will be the InReach^10x Dual Major Seminar Special. This event celebrates academics as multidimensional colleagues with skills that extend beyond academia. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity!

We are thrilled to have Professor Nick Dale as our inaugural InReach10x "Dual Major" speaker who will deliver a 30-minute violin recital before his seminar talk which will be followed by a food and drinks reception. The event will take place at the Helen Martin Studio from 3:30 to 5:30 pm.

“CO₂ -not just a waste product”

CO₂ is commonly regarded as the inevitable by-product of cellular metabolism. The thesis of my talk is that although CO2 is a waste product, it also conveys in functional information in physiological systems. I will give an account of our discovery that ion channels called connexins are directly sensitive to CO2 I will discuss the mechanism of CO₂ binding and channel opening and show high resolution cryoEM structure. I will show that one of these CO₂-sensitive connexins is important in the regulation of breathing. I will discuss our latest results showing that there are many more connexins that are directly sensitive to CO₂ than we first thought. CO₂ sensitive connexins are present in all the major organs of the body suggesting that CO₂ acts to signal information in many diverse contexts, and I will discuss an exciting emerging role for CO₂-mediated signalling in the maintenance of myelin. I will finish with our investigations of the receptors that insects use to sense CO₂ and our efforts to create novel tools from these receptors to measure CO₂ production in real time in physiological systems.

Sign up hereLink opens in a new window to attend Nick's talk and discover more about InReach^10x.