Herbert Zimmermann (neuroscientist)

Herbert Zimmermann ( born January 10, 1944 in Chiesch ) is a German neuroscientist.

Life

Zimmermann studied from 1964 to 1969 Chemistry and Biology at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich and received his doctorate at the University of Regensburg in 1971. In the two following years he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Cambridge. In the years 1973-1979 he was a scientist and group leader at the Department of Neurochemistry, Max - Planck - Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. From 1980 to 1983 he taught as a professor of neurobiology at the University of Oldenburg. In 1983 he was appointed to a Chair of Zoology and Head of the Department of Neurochemistry at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. In 1987 he was a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Brain Research of the Medical Faculty of the University of Tokyo (Tokyo Daigaku ) operates. In the years from 1991 to 1995 he was president of the German Neuroscience Society. In 2008 he was elected president of the German Purine Club. After his retirement in 2010, he remained active in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.

Scientific activity

The focus of his scientific work was in the field of synaptic transmission and later the signal transmission by extracellular nucleotides. In the laboratory of Victor P. Whittaker in Cambridge, he began his studies on the dynamics of synaptic Vesikelkompartiments. He used the electric organ of the Torpedo (Torpedo marmorata ), the neuromuscular contacts of the mammal is homologous, as a model system for the cholinergic synaptic neurotransmission. This system allowed simultaneous stimulation and electrophysiological analysis and the electron microscope, and more particularly, the biochemical analysis of the synaptic Vesikelkompartiments. He showed that stimulation of the nerve induces both morphological and biochemical heterogeneity of synaptic vesicles. Vesicles that had gone through at least one cycle of exo-and endocytosis, could be separated by density gradient centrifugation or by chromatography on porous glass beads. They were preferentially filled with newly synthesized acetylcholine and ATP - in contrast to the so-called reserve pool of synaptic vesicles, which until then had not been involved in the synaptic transmission process. These data suggested that synaptic activation leads to heterogeneity of synaptic vesicles, the straight back loaded vesicles acetylcholine and ATP preferentially release again. They provided a cell biological explanation for a hitherto unsolved problem from the earlier study history of synaptic transmission, which is that stimulated nerve endings newly synthesized acetylcholine release preferentially.

Furthermore, he showed that released from the electrical nerve extracellular ATP is hydrolyzed to adenosine, which in turn is taken up via a high-affinity transport system in the nerve terminal, where it is rephosphorylated and incorporated into the vesicles again in the form of ATP. Starting from the observation that ATP is hydrolyzed extracellularly, he examined the biochemical mechanisms that are broken down in the released nucleotides to the nucleoside. This led to the isolation and molecular cloning of the AMP -hydrolyzing enzyme ecto- 5'-nucleotidase as well as a number of nucleoside and nucleoside -hydrolyzing enzymes of the family of the ecto- Nukleosidtriphosphatdiphosphohydrolasen. He initiated a new nomenclature for these enzymes as well as for the Ekto-Pyrophosphatasen/Phosphodiesterasen.

Lately, he led investigations into the proteome of synaptic vesicles by and the role of extracellular nucleotides in the control of adult neurogenesis, the formation of new nerve cells in the adult mammalian brain.

Awards and Affiliations

• 2000 Johannes -Müller Lecture, Berlin
• 2006 Geoffrey Burnstock Lecture, Ferrara, Italy
• 2007 election as a corresponding member of the Real Academia Nacional de Farmacia, Spain
• 2009 Elected member of the Academia Europaea
• 2013 Giuliana Fassina Award of the Italian Purine Club

Publications (selection)

• With H. Altner: The saccus vasculosus. In: The Structure and Function of Nervous Tissue. Vol V, Academic Press, New York / London, 1972, ISBN 0-19-508293-1, pp. 293-328.
• With CR Denston: recycling of synaptic vesicles in the cholinergic synapses of the Torpedo electric organ falling on induced transmitter release. In: Neuroscience. 2 (1977 ), pp. 695-714.
• With VP Whittaker: Morphological and biochemical heterogeneity of cholinergic synaptic vesicles. In: Nature. Lond. 267 (1977), pp. 633-635.
• Turnover of adenine nucleotides in cholinergic synaptic vesicles of the Torpedo electric organ. In: Neuroscience. 3 (1978 ), pp. 827-836.
• With MJ Dowdall and DA Lane: Purine salvage at the cholinergic nerve endings of the Torpedo electric organ: the central role of adenosine. In: Neuroscience. 4 (1979 ), pp. 979-993.
• Vesicle recycling and transmitter release. In: Neuroscience. 4 (1979 ), pp. 1773-1804.
• On the vesicle hypothesis. In: Trends Neurosci. 2 (1979 ), pp. 282-285.
• With GW Kreutzberg and M. Reddington (ed.): Cellular Biology of Ectoenzymes. Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York / Tokyo, 1986, ISBN 3-540-15746-8.
• With EJM Grondal: Purification, characterization and cellular localization of 5'- nucleotidase from Torpedo electric organ. In: Biochem. J. 245 (1987), pp. 805-810.
• 5'- nucleotidase praise from the electric ray electric: with W. Volknandt, M. Vogel, J. Pevsner, Y. Misumi and Y. Ikehara. Primary structure and relation to mammalian and procaryotic enzymes. In: Biochem. J. 202 (1991), pp. 855-861.
• Synaptic transmission. Cellular and Molecular basis. Thieme / Oxford University Press, 1993.
• With B. Kegel, N. Braun, P. Heine, CR Maliszewski: An ecto -ATPase and ecto -ATP diphosphohydrolase to are overexpressed in brain. In: Neuropharmacology. 36 (1997 ), pp. 1189-1200.
• With P. Illes (ed.): Nucleotides and Their Receptors in the Nervous System. Elesevier, Amsterdam / New York / Oxford / Tokyo 1999.
• With N. Brown, S. Fengler, C. Ebeling and J. Servos: Sequencing, functional expression and characterization of rat NTPDase6, a nucleoside diphosphatase and novel member of the ecto - nucleoside triphosphate diphosphohydrolase family. In: Biochem. J. 351 (2000), pp. 639-647.
• SK Mishra, N. Brown, V. Shukla, M. Füllgrabe, C. Schomerus, H.-W. Korf, C. Gachet, Y. Ikehara, J. Sévigny and Robson SC: Extracellular nucleotide signaling in adult neural stem cells: synergism with growth factor -mediated cellular proliferation. In: Development. 133 (2006), pp. 675-684.
• With J. BURRE, T. Beck House, H. Schägger, C. Corvey, S. Hofmann, M. Karas and W. Volknandt: Analysis of the synaptic vesicle proteome using three gel -based protein separation techniques. In: Proteomics. 6 (2006 ), pp. 6250-6262.