Perrais David

Biography

He started his research career by neuroscience PhD, led by Nicole Ropert at the Institute Alfred Fessard (Gif-sur-Yvette) where he studied the inhibitory synaptic transmission in the cortex. He has taken the side, which he has kept in the various questions that he has discussed later, to try to control as much as possible the phenomenon that he had to study. Thus, to study the properties of receptors during synaptic transmission, he chose to control the application of the neurotransmitter by performing rapid applications of agonist on patches outside-out, which allowed me to discover modulations latent, invisible when looking only at synaptic currents (Perrais and Ropert, 1999). Then, in his post-doctoral position in the team of Wolf Almers (Portland, USA), he also tried to control the extracellular environment to understand how the selectivity of protein releases by the vesicles of the chromaffin cells (Taraska et al., 2003, Perrais et al., 2004). Using electrophysiology and imaging techniques (especially TIRF microscopy) and these techniques of control and rapid changes in the extracellular environment, he conducted two projects on his return to France, in the laboratory of Christophe Mulle in Bordeaux. First, he undertook the study of the biophysical properties of kainate-type glutamate receptors by rapid applications of patch agonists (Coussen et al., 2005, Pinheiro et al., 2007, Perrais et al., 2009a, b Perrais et al., 2010). This stage of his itinerary concludes with Julien Veran's thesis work on the potentiation by extracellular zinc of kainate receptors.

Research Interest

Neurology