Greg Cole, PI

I have had a passion for science, including neuroscience, since I was in middle and high school. I was involved in independent research as an undergraduate throughout most of my college years, working in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Moore on frog skeletal muscle Na-K ATPase. This experience helped strengthen my desire to pursue graduate study in Neuroscience and a career in academia.

I was fortunate to work in the laboratory of Dr. John Elam at Florida State University on a nerve regeneration project using the garfish olfactory nerve, studying the role of glycoproteins in promoting axonal regeneration. Much of the Elam lab research focused on the characterization of proteoglycans and their role in nervous system development or regeneration, and due to the crude biochemical approaches available at that time to study this class of glycoproteins I swore I would never study proteoglycans. So more about that later.

After receiving my PhD from Florida State University I joined Dr. Luis Glaser's laboratory at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, to generate monoclonal antibodies (a new technology at that time) against novel neural antigens that are critical for nervous system development in the chick. These were informative years, as the Glaser laboratory was a hotbed of cutting edge research, and Luis Glaser was a model mentor who helped develop my research skills. During this time in the Glaser laboratory I generated MAbs to what we would learn was NCAM, but would make the novel discovery that while carrying out cell adhesion by a homophilic binding mechanism, NCAM also used heterophilic binding to heparan sulfate proteoglycans to modulate its activity.

After moving to the University of Miami with Luis Glaser when he assumed the duties of Provost at UM, I established my independent research program at the Medical University of South Carolina, where my lab continued to characterize the role of NCAM's heterophilic binding to heparan sulfate. A natural progression of this research was to identify the heparan sulfate proteoglycan (HSPG) that binds to NCAM to modulate cell adhesion mediated by NCAM. So here I was less than 10 years after being at FSU avoiding proteoglycans, working on these molecules but at least now with better tools, such as MAbs and gene cloning by antibody screening. With my graduate student Michael Burg, and beginning a fruitful collaboration with Willi Halfter's lab at the University of Pittsburgh, and moving my lab to Ohio State University, we identified the HSPG that binds NCAM. Surprisingly, we showed that this HSPG was agrin, thereby identifying this molecule as at that time only the 4th HSPG to be described. This was the dissertation work of Guoshan Tsen, a PhD student in my lab at OSU. Through subsequent studies we showed that agrin is an important HSPG associated with Alzheimer's disease lesions, the work of a PhD student in the lab, Susan Cotman, who now has her own lab at Harvard studying neurodegenerative diseases.

I soon moved my lab from OSU to North Carolina State University, wanting to live in a more favorable climate than central Ohio. With Min Jung Kim, a PhD student, and Dr. Ju-Ahng Lee, a post-doc, my lab shifted to a new animal model, the zebrafish, in order to be able to better characterize the function of agrin during CNS development. These studies eventually led my lab to where we are now, as these studies showed that many of the phenotypes produced by morpholino knockdown of agrin in zebrafish embryos resemble phenotypes produced by alcohol exposure in vertebrate embryos. These studies also served as the basis of a dissertation research project by I-Hsuan Liu, who now has his own lab at the National Taiwan University.

My lab currently is using the zebrafish model to develop an FASD model that faithfully recapitulates the effects of ethanol exposure in human embryos. Our goal is to identify molecular targets of ethanol that account for the FASD defects that are observed in humans, to associate these molecular changes with behavioral changes that persist throughout life, and ultimately by understanding the pathophysiology of ethanol exposure to identify therapeutic strategies to alleviate the pathology of FASD.

Outside the lab I keep myself busy (and relaxed) by being an avid reader of novels from authors the like of John Grisham, David Baldacci, Ken Follett and Clive Cussler. I enjoy gardening with my wife (living off the land) and am an avid sportsman. I enjoy playing golf and bowling with my two sons, who are now able to beat me in these sports. I am an avid bicyclist, especially the trails of the Capital Area Greenway Trail System. I also enjoy attending sports events, especially traveling to Tallahassee for FSU sports or NYC for Yankee games. I also enjoy watching movies, which is obvious from my teaching a Biology elective: BIOL 2040 Biology in Films. The other animals on this page are not animal models for my research, but my faithful four-legged companions.