Giles Hardingham

Biography

Professor Giles Hardingham Centre for Integrative Physiology – Centre for Neuroregeneration University of Edinburgh

Research Interest

My overarching interests centre on how Ca2+ signals control gene expression in neurons, and how this in turn controls both neuronal survival and death. One major principle that I established was that Ca2+ signals with different spatial properties can trigger distinct transcriptional responses in neurons. I demonstrated in papers published in Nature and Nature Neuroscience ´97-01 that Ca2+ can act in the nucleus, the cytoplasm, and in submembranous regions to trigger qualitatively distinct patterns of gene expression. I found a key role for nuclear Ca2+ in controlling activity-dependent induction of a transcription factor called CREB and subsequently implicated both CREB and nuclear Ca2+ in the neuroprotective effects of synaptic activity. Another contribution to the field of Ca2+mediated transcriptional control was to show that transcriptional coactivators and corepressors can be targets for neuronal Ca2+-activated signal pathways, and not just the transcription factors themselves. I was a joint 1st author on the first study (in Science ´99) to show that a transcriptional coactivator (CBP) could be controlled by Ca2+.