Continuing Education Event Announcement
“Crosstalk between the virus, the animals, and homo sapiens”
Speaker: Dr. Francisco Barrantes, Professor and Head, Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology, Institute of Biomedical Research UCA-CONICET. Emeritus Investigador Superior, CONICET.
Thursday, Aug 27th, 3pm
UWC Personal Zoom Room
RSVP for Zoom meeting details to u.w.c.cont.ed@gmail.com
Below is a summary of Dr. Barrantes's seminar and of his most salient scientific activities and accomplishments. YOU DO NOT WANT TO MISS THIS TALK, if you never used zoom before, this is the time to try it out.
Crosstalk between the virus, the animals, and homo sapiens
Francisco Barrantes
Unlike previous occurrences of coronavirus diseases, the virulence (pathogenicity) of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus coupled to the unpreparedness of most governments and health care systems around the world have catapulted COVID-19 into a global phenomenon that goes beyond an epidemiological event: the virus has affected essentially all realms of life worldwide.
I will give a guided tour of the biology of the new virus, introducing the family, its history and how it may have become a human threat via animals that serve as hosts.
This will be followed by an overview of how the virus first hijacks a protein at the surface of our cells to subsequently invade it and take control of its machinery to manufacture many copies of itself.
As we learn more about the new viral disease, it has become evident that circumscribing it to a severe acute respiratory syndrome is neither an accurate nor a comprehensive description of this entity. I will provide an overview of the entry point and routes followed by the virus to reach other destinations; based on my bias as a neuroscientist I will focus on the brain.
Seven months of experience on COVID-19, together with the previous knowledge on other coronavirus have produced an unprecedented explosion of scientific data, unfortunately tinted by disinformation and fake news. Yet the balance is positive, and our comprehension of the culprit and the disease have advanced considerably.
Dr. Francisco Barrantes: CV highlights:
Francisco J. Barrantes (M.D., Ph.D. Supervisor: with Prof. E. De Robertis, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina).
Current position: Professor and Head, Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology, Institute of Biomedical Research UCA-CONICET. Emeritus Investigador Superior, CONICET.
Former Director of CONICET-Bahía Blanca and the Institute of Biochemistry (CONICET-Universidad Nacional del Sur).
He spent a decade in Germany and became the head of the Membrane Biophysics Unit at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen together with Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann, who were later awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.
He has also collaborated for several years and published several papers with Nobel awardees in Chemistry Stefan Hell (2014) and Joachim Frank (2017).
Dr. Barrantes’ fields of expertise are the molecular neurobiology and biophysics of synaptic receptors. He has published ca. 280 papers in international journals, including more than 80 reviews/book chapters, and two books.
As a visiting professor, Dr. Barrantes spent sabbatical leaves at Harvard Medical School; the Weizmann Inst. Science, Rehovot; the Dept. of Neurobiology & Behavior at Stony Brook; the Biochemistry Dept. at Oxford University; MRC LMB, Cambridge and the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, which he visited more than a dozen times.
His membership in scientific academies includes: National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, Argentina; Academy of Sciences, Brazil; World Academy of Sciences (TWAS); European Academy of Sciences; Indian Science Academy; Latin American Academy of Sciences.
Awards & honours: Fellow, Wellcome Trust, UK; Bernardo Houssay Award, Argentina; TWAS Award in Biology; Fellow, Neuroscience Inst., N. York; Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Award, Germany; Sarojini Damodaran International Trust Award, India; Konex Award in Molecular and Cell Biology, Argentina; Fulbright Scholar, Harvard Medical School; Prémio União Latina, Portugal; Miguel Lillo Medal; Human Frontier Sci. Progr.; Royal Society, UK; De Robertis Medal, Consacration Medal of the Academy of Sciences of Argentina; TWAS Medal; Ciencia Sem Fronteiras, Ministry of Education & Ministry of Science, Brazil.