G2C is an international collaborative program initiated by Dr. Seth Grant and supported by the Wellcome Trust following the discovery that multiprotein complexes formed by intracellular proteins and neurotransmitter receptors were important for neuronal plasticity and behaviour.
These protein complexes are microscopic molecular machines inside synapses - the junctions between nerve cells. Molecular proteomic studies show there are more than 1000 synapse proteins working together to process information in the brain.
Multiprotein complexes are involved with dozens of brain diseases, control multiple types of behaviours and are involved with the responses to drug treatments of mental disorders. Evolutionary studies show ancient forms of the complexes evolved over a billion years in single cell animals and may represent the origin of the brain.
Our long term goal is to understand the molecular basis of the extraordinarily complex brain of humans, how this complexity evolved, what it confers on behaviour and why brain evolution made us susceptible to mental illness.
G2C collaborators include scientists with complementary and wide ranging expertise from molecular biologists, computational biologists, electrophysiologists to psychiatrists, together studying the biology of synapses.
The G2C project has a unique database called G2Cdb that houses data resources from our research program.
G2C has an educational program called G2COnline developed in collaboration with the DNA Learning Centre at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA.
