JacSue Kehoe

JacSue Kehoe, born October 23, 1935, is an American neuroscientist and neuroscience researcher. She has spent decades working with the neurons of Aplysia californica, studying post-synaptic nerve response.^[1] Through her work she made the discovery that there can be multiple types of receptors for one neurotransmitter, which all could vary in level and type of response.^[2] She has spent most of her life living in Paris with her husband and fellow researcher, Philippe Ascher, and their two children. Kehoe works for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique,^[1] where she has made many other discoveries in neuroscience.

Biography

Early life

JacSue Kehoe was born on October 23, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio.^[1] Her mother was a former doctoral candidate turned English teacher, and her father an employee of the Chrysler Corporation. The youngest of three, Kehoe and her family moved to Evansville, Indiana for the duration of World War II for her father’s work.^[1] After the war they migrated back to the city, where Kehoe discovered her interest in the performing arts. She became assistant to the dramatic arts teacher at her high school: this position inspired her to become a theater director.^[1] In the interest of having this career, she went on to attend Northwestern University and pursued a degree in theater.^[1]

Further education

After two years pursuing her theater degree, Kehoe began to realize how deeply competitive the dramatic arts and theater really was. Disheartened by the seeming impossibility of obtaining the career she so desired, Kehoe looked to other majors.^[1] After trying geology and biology, she instead switched her major to experimental psychology. Human behavior was a major interest of the field, and Kehoe performed experiments testing memory for her honor’s thesis. After two years she graduated Northwestern with a B.A. in experimental psychology.^[1]

After earning her undergraduate degree Kehoe went on to continue her education in graduate school. Her focus still on memory, Kehoe was accepted to attend Brown University.^[1] Brown had a strong focus on the function of the nervous system and its relation to psychology, which she thought was important to furthering her understanding of human memory.^[1] She performed experiments concerning the proactive and retroactive inhibition of memory retention on pigeons,^[3] earning her Ph.D. in 1961.

Career

Following her graduate studies Kehoe joined the psychology faculty of Brown University, before moving to Washington, D.C. to continue her research. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research she furthered her study of discrimination learning in pigeons, rats and squirrels, and became increasingly focused on the physiological basis of behavior in her research.^[1] In a lab next door to hers another researcher, Felix Strumwasser, was using neurons from Aplysia Californica, a species of sea slug, to study circadian rhythms. These cells were ideal for studying the effects of neurotransmitters on neuron behavior: Using discarded Aplysia ganglia and equipment provided to her by Strumwasser’s lab, Kehoe began her study of synaptic physiology.^[1]

In 1964 Kehoe moved to Paris, France to continue her work on Aplysia^[4][5] at the Institut Marey. She began experimenting to find out the neurotransmitter that brought about postsynaptic potentials (PSP) in her Aplysia^[1]. Attempting to use curare, a Cholinergic antagonist, to this end, she observed instead a change in the spontaneous synaptic activity of the cells.^[1] This activity was unusual, so she refocused her research on this hyperpolarizing response for several years. After many tests using a setup of her own design Kehoe discovered that methyl-xylocholine, an Adrenergic neuron blocker, inhibited the K-dependent response she had found in the cells.^[1] This was unusual, as the Aplysia response she was researching was cholinergic and should not have changed with the addition of an adrenergic inhibitor at all. From this data Kehoe was able to determine that both the adrenergic and cholinergic responses she observed involved the same receptor.^[1] With further study she was also able to determine that multiple receptors for a particular neurotransmitter could be found on a neuron,^[2] each receptor could change the conductance of the neurotransmitter in a different and independent manner, and that the postsynaptic response could vary from cell to cell.^[1]

In 1967 Kehoe married fellow researcher Philippe Ascher, a native of France. Her time at the Institut Marey up, Kehoe remained in France instead of returning to the United States. Kehoe applied for a position as a full time researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (C.N.R.S.), where she continues to work today.^[1][6] In the fall of 1968 she had her first son David: two months later she and Philippe traveled to Cambridge^[7] on sabbatical, where they continued their research in their separate departments. Kehoe worked under Gabriel Horn in the anatomy department, who arranged for her to be admitted to High Table at King's College. At the time High Table was all male- Kehoe was the first visiting female academic to be granted access.^[1]

In the same year her husband Philippe accepted a teaching position in Paris, so that they could operate their own lab. Upon their return from Cambridge they were given space at École Normale Supérieure^[1] where they could build their lab. Over the summers following their return to Paris Kehoe also acted as an instructor at a research program in the United States. Working under Harvard University’s James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory she taught courses to Harvard students with an interest in neuroscience research.^[1][4][8] A year after she began working at Cold Spring Harbor Kehoe gave birth to her second son, Ivan. Despite the increase in what she considered to be her motherly duties, Kehoe continued to travel the world, giving seminars and conferences on her discoveries, as well as performing her own experiments.^[1][9] She continued her research to identify the neurotransmitters used in Aplysia, turning her attention towards glutamate^[1][10] receptors in the late 20th century. In 2002 she and Philippe gave up their lab to other researchers, and moved their research to the lab of their colleagues, Alain Marty and Isabel Llano, in another part of Paris.^[1] Kehoe recently entered her eighth decade of life, and continues researching neurotransmitters and their effects.

Published works

• Effects of Prior and Interpolated Learning on Retention in Pigeons.^[3] Journal of Experimental Psychology, June 1963
• Pharmacological Characteristics and Ionic Bases of a Two Component Postsynaptic Inhibition.^[11] Nature (journal), September 1967
• Single Presynaptic Neurone mediates a Two Component Postsynaptic Inhibition. Nature (journal), March 1969
• Re-evaluation of the Synaptic Activation of an Electrogenic Sodium Pump.^[12] Nature (journal), February 1970
• Three Acetylcholine Receptors in Aplysia Neurones.^[2] The Journal of Physiology, August 1972
• Transformation by Concanavalin A of the Response of Molluscan Neurones to L-glutamate.^[13] Nature (journal), August 1978
• Cyclic AMP-Induced Slow Inward Current: its Synaptic Manifestation in Aplysia Neurons.^[14] The Journal of Neuroscience, October 1990
• Two Distinct Nicotinic Receptors, One Pharmacologically Similar to the Vertebrate α7-Containing Receptor, Mediate Cl Currents in Aplysia Neurons,^[15] The Journal of Neuroscience, October 1998
• Independence of and Interactions between GABA-, Glutamate-, and Acetylcholine-Activated Cl Conductances in Aplysia Neurons,^[10] The Journal of Neuroscience, December 2000
• A Pertussis Toxin-Sensitive 8-Lipoxygenase Pathway Is Activated by a Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor in Aplysia Neurons.^[16] Journal of Neurophysiology, May 2001
• Aplysia cys-loop Glutamate-Gated Chloride Channels Reveal Convergent Evolution of Ligand Specificity.^[17] Journal of Molecular Evolution, August 2009
• Molecular Determinants of Agonist Selectivity in Glutamate-Gated Chloride Channels Which Likely Explain the Agonist Selectivity of the Vertebrate Glycine and GABAA-[rho] Receptors: e108458,^[18] PLOS ONE, September 2014

References