Augen Pioszak
Associate Professor, Department of Biochemistry & Physiology University of Oklahoma
Dr. Augen Pioszak was an undergraduate at Michigan State University in the Department of Biochemistry. His undergraduate research and senior thesis were in the laboratory of Dr. Zachary Burton on Structure and Function of the TFIIF and TFIIB General Transcription Factors. His graduate work was at the University of Michigan in the laboratory of Dr. Alexander Ninfa on Structure and Function of Bacterial Two-component Signal Transduction Proteins. Dr. Pioszak did two postdoctoral fellowships. The first was with Dr. Shigeyuki Yokoyama at the RIKEN Yokohama Institute, Yokohama, JAPAN doing X-ray crystallography. The second was with Dr. H. Eric Xu at the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, MI, on the Structural Biology of G Protein-coupled Receptors. Dr. Pioszak is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Pioszak is currently working on a NIH funded project ?RAMP-altered Class B GPCR Hormone Recognition?. His laboratory has many excellent publications including in Molecular Cell, Biochemistry, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Protein Science and Molecular Pharmacology.
Seminars
- Expose how conventional cAMP assays generate composite signals from mixed populations of free calcitonin receptors and amylin receptor heterodimers, obscuring the true activity of individual ligands
- Introduce new assays capable of distinguishing AMY1, AMY2 and AMY3 heterodimers within mixed receptor populations, enabling direct pharmacological characterisation of each receptor subtype
- Examine how different ligands influence receptor-subunit association, dissociation and signalling dynamics, revealing functional differences between the three amylin receptor complexes
- Explore how receptor-specific pharmacology and signalling kinetics could ultimately be linked with clinical efficacy and tolerability to support rational ligand design
