Society of
General physiologists

In 2005, SGP instituted two new Paul F. Cranefield awards, one each to be given annually to a deserving postdoctoral fellow and a graduate student who are the first authors of manuscripts published in Journal of General Physiology. In truly exceptional cases, undergraduate students will be considered for a third award. Awardees will receive $1000 in addition to being featured on the Society's website.

To be considered for such an award, the candidate must have had a major role in the planning, execution, and analysis of the results - and contributed significantly to the writing. Candidates shall write a one-page summary of the work, emphasizing its overall significance and describing specifically his or her contributions to the research and writing, and email it to admin@sgpweb.org.

2023 Cranefield Postdoc Awardee: Krishna Reddy, Ph.D.

Krishna Reddy for “The archaeal glutamate transporter homologue GltPh shows heterogeneous substrate binding"

J Gen Physiol (2022) 154 (5): e202213131. https://doi.org/10.1085/jgp.202213131

Reddy and colleagues show that the lyotropic properties of anions binding to GltPh, an archaeal homologue of glutamate transporters, regulate the transporter’s conformational flexibility possibly explaining why GltPh displays long-lived ‘kinetic heterogeneity’ in its transport behavior, thus providing a blueprint to understand how anions might contribute to regulating the overall transporter rate.

2023 Cranefield Student Awardee: Nicole Godellas

Nicole Godellas for “Probing function in ligand-gated ion channels without measuring ion transport"

J Gen Physiol (2022) 154 (6): e202213082. https://doi.org/10.1085/jgp.202213082

In this manuscript Godellas and Grosman revisit the classical equilibrium competitive radioligand binding method to show that, once true binding equilibrium is achieved, the ligand binding sites in the α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor channels are identical and independent and that distal mutations have little to no effect on binding affinity and affect only the gating equilibrium constant. This approach paves the way to study ion-channel function when electrophysiological studies are not possible.

(click here for past award winners)