| Citation | Professor Cull-Candy is distinguished for his long-sustained and innovative experimental studies on glutamate-mediated excitatory synaptic transmission in both invertebrate and mammalian nervous systems. His many achievements include the first measurements of current noise at a glutamate-operated junction; the introduction of the perfused patch-electrode method and its use to identify single glutamate-activated cation channels; the detection of glutamate-activated channels in astrocytes; the identification of a proton-sensitive site on the NMDA class of glutamate receptors; and the discoveries that glutamate-activated channels have multiple conductance states and that there are distinct subtypes of the NMDA channels. These latter observations (very novel at the time) anticipated the complexities revealed by subsequent cloning of cDNAs for the various channel subunits, and his more recent research exploits this information to identify the molecular nature of the normally-functional synaptic channels in neurones. Previously, he carried out some important work on skeletal neuromuscular junctions, particularly in connection with myasthenia. Thus, he completed the first voltage-clamp recording of human muscle, showing that myasthenic end-plates contained a reduced number of otherwise-normal nicotinic channels, and later identified a hitherto-unexpected presynaptic defect at myasthenic junctions. He studies processes of physiological and pathological importance using refined and frequently novel experimental techniques and is at the forefront of his field internationally. |