Edward George Gray

Edward George Gray (1924–1999) was a British anatomist and neuroscientist who pioneered the investigation of neural tissues with transmission electron microscopy. During his professional career, Gray made a number of profound contributions to our knowledge of synaptic structure.[1] To this day, synapses are classified according to their ultrastructure as Gray type 1 (symmetric) or type 2 (asymmetric), corresponding to inhibitory and excitatory synapses.

Life and major contributions

Edward G. Gray came to the Anatomy Department at University College London (UCL) in 1955 to work as a postdoctoral assistant to John Z. Young. In 1959, he published a seminal paper on the synaptic structure in mammalian neocortex, describing a specialized organelle inside dendritic spines that he named the spine apparatus.[2] In 1962, he published a method for isolating synaptosomes which are isolated axon terminals purified by centrifugation.[3] In 1970, he described the clathrin coats of recycling vesicles and proposed that the coats provide a scaffold that determines the vesicle size.[4] He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. In his later years, he suffered from severe clinical depression.[5]

References
  1. Guillery, R (1 December 2000). "Early electron microscopic observations of synaptic structures in the cerebral cortex: a view of the contributions made by George Gray (1924–1999)". Trends in Neurosciences. 23 (12): 594–598. doi:10.1016/S0166-2236(00)01635-0. PMID 11137148. S2CID 23484682.
  2. Gray, E. G. (1959). "Axo-somatic and axo-dendritic synapses of the cerebral cortex: an electron microscope study". Journal of Anatomy. 93 (Pt 4): 420–433. ISSN 0021-8782. PMC 1244535. PMID 13829103.
  3. Gray, E. G.; Whittaker, V. P. (1962). "The isolation of nerve endings from brain: an electron-microscopic study of cell fragments derived by homogenization and centrifugation". Journal of Anatomy. 96 (Pt 1): 79–88. ISSN 0021-8782. PMC 1244174. PMID 13901297.
  4. Gray, E. G.; Willis, R. A. (1 December 1970). "On synaptic vesicles, complex vesicles and dense projections". Brain Research. 24 (2): 149–168. doi:10.1016/0006-8993(70)90097-1. ISSN 0006-8993. PMID 4099165.
  5. Gray, E. George (1983). "Severe Depression: A Patient's Thoughts". The British Journal of Psychiatry. 143 (4): 319–322. doi:10.1192/bjp.143.4.319. ISSN 0007-1250. PMID 6626849. S2CID 10598570.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.