Yoav Paas is a neuroscientist at the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences of the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He received his PhD in neurobiology from the Weizmann Institute of Science, for his research on ionotropic glutamate receptors. At the end of 1996, he started his postdoctoral research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he worked on the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. He moved to the Faculty of Life Sciences at the Bar-Ilan University in October 2006, where he established the Laboratory of Ion Channels. He is a Review Editor for Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience. His areas of interest include neuroscience, physiology, and biophysics and pharmacology of ion channels.

 Research: Biophysics, Pharmacology, and Structure of Ion Channels

 Our laboratory is interested in Cys-loop receptors. The latter are ionic channels activated by neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, serotonin, glycine, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), histamine, or glutamate. Cys-loop receptors play a key role in our day-to-day functions, from body motions to cognitive processes, as they mediate and regulate fast transmission of chemo-electric signals throughout the nervous system. Being physiologically important, impairment of Cys-loop receptor activity leads to neurological disorders such as epilepsy, irritable bowel syndrome, addiction to nicotine, exaggerated startle responses, and other disorders.

More specifically, we focus on molecular aspects of Cys-loop receptors at high resolution, as follows:

1. Biophysical aspects that include mechanisms of channel gating, mechanisms of ionic permeation and ionic selectivity, and mechanisms underlying coupling of the neurotransmitter-binding site to channel activity.

2. Pharmacological aspects that include mechanisms of ligand recognition and rational drug design.

The research in our laboratory employs the following techniques: recombinant DNA technology, protein engineering, protein purification, protein crystallization, ligand-binding assays, electrophysiological recordings of ionic currents, and computer-assisted structural modeling.