Initially trained as a physician, Dr. Puthenveedu has been interested in the biology of the opioid system for over 20 years. After a clinical internship and research fellowship studying GPCRs in the brain, Dr. Puthenveedu obtained a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in cell biology. At that time, fascinating data that opioid receptor trafficking was relevant to addiction and opioid physiology was emerging in the field. This led Dr. Puthenveedu to join Mark von Zastrow’s lab at UCSF for postdoctoral work to study the mechanisms of opioid receptor trafficking. Dr. Puthenveedu’s postdoctoral work identified specific motifs on opioid and related GPCRs that allowed for regulation of endocytic trafficking when activated by synthetic agonists.
Dr. Puthenveedu’s independent lab, established in 2009, followed up on this early work to understand the spatial organization of opioid receptor signaling in neurons, and how this organization regulates opioid physiology. The lab pioneered the development and use of high-resolution fluorescence microscopy and molecular genetics to directly visualize and analyze opioid receptor organization, trafficking, and signaling in living cells in real time. Dr. Puthenveedu and the lab tem provided key evidence to the emerging idea that opioid receptor signaling is spatially encoded, i.e., that the location of receptors is a key determinant of physiology, and that the primary role of membrane trafficking might be to move receptors between distinct signaling complexes that are located on different membranes in the neuron.
The current focus of the lab is to understand the mechanisms that localize opioid receptors to different compartments in neurons, and to understand how the location of signal origin regulates downstream consequences for any particular combination of ligand and receptor.