I am seeking for a
research position in the field of Neurobiology. Appointment at the Research Assistant Professor level is desirable. |
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| I have been working as associate research scientist in Dr.
Robert Hawkins lab in the Center
for Neurobiology & Behavior and conducting electrophysiological experiments
including cellular and molecular mechanisms of neuronal plasticity. I graduated from Kiev State University where my graduation work won first prize among young scientists of the former USSR for fundamental work in neurophysiology. I have obtained my Ph.D. from the Institute of Physiology in 1992 and received training in the fields of neurophysiology of learning and molecular biology of local protein synthesis. During this time I have been studied modulation of cholinergic synaptic transmission and changes in protein phosphorylation in the postsynaptic structures (Antonov et al., Comp Biochem Physiol 98C:323–327). I then left the Ukraine for brief postdocs in the departments of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, UK and Physiology and Biophysics, University Illinois at Chicago before moving to Columbia University. Since 1994 I joined Dr. Sue Wonnacott group (Departments of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath). During my stay in her lab I have been studied effect of antagonists and agonists on the transient transfection of the subunits (a7) of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in cultured mammalian cells (HEK-293 and COS-7). I have provided toxin-binding and protein determination assay, extraction and purification of cDNA; expression and protein isolation assay; tissue radiolabelling and signal transduction into mammalian cell culture. In 1995 I worked as Postdoctoral Research Associate in Dr. Sergey Popov laboratory (Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Chicago). I have used an electrophysiological technique for the detection of individual ACh secretion events to characterize ACh secretion along growing Xenopus axons in culture. The main finding of the these studies was that, at the early stage of axonal growth, ACh release from the neuron takes place along the axon, as well as at the growth cone. At the later stages of growth, the exocytotic activity is preferentially localized to the distal axonal region (Antonov et al., Neuroscience 1999 Mar;90(3):975-84.). To our knowledge, this is the first semiquantitative measurement of the topology of neurotransmitter release along developing axons. Since 1996 I have been first a postdoc and then an Associate Research Scientist in Dr. Robert Hawkins laboratory at Columbia University. During this time I have been studying cellular and molecular mechanisms of plasticity contributing to simple forms of learning – habituation, dishabituation, sensitization and classical conditioning in the marine mollusk Aplysia. We found that the conditioning is due in part to associative activity-dependent plasticity at the sensory-motor neurons synapses (Antonov et al., J Neurosci 1999). I then went on to examine the contributions of two associative, activity-dependent forms of plasticity that have been observed at these synapses, activity-dependent presynaptic facilitation and Hebbian long-term potentiation, and found that each contributes to the synaptic plasticity during learning (Antonov et al., J Neurosci 2001). Furthermore, blocking either form of plasticity by injecting agents into several sensory or motor neurons blocked the behavioral learning (Antonov et al., Neuron 2003). These experiments thus provide some of the strongest evidence from any system that these mechanisms of synaptic plasticity contribute to learning. In addition, these results suggest that the two mechanisms are not independent but rather interact through retrograde signaling. By using 2-photon microscopy, I have recently begun to explore whether there are also microstructural changes during classical conditioning, using imaging of pre- and postsynaptic Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) fusion proteins in living neurons (Antonov et al., Society for Neuroscience 33th Annual Meeting, November 7-12, 2003 New Orleans). |
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| Home || Research Interests: Learning and Memory, Neurotransmitter secretion |