Adhesion GPCRs are the largest receptors in the human genome — and until recently, no one was certain they coupled to G proteins at all. Boucard is working to change that, one synapse at a time.
Antony Boucard didn't plan to be a scientist. He was heading toward medical school — fresh from social work in Nicaragua, where he built wood-burning ovens for women's cooperatives, and years of service in the Canadian Navy Reserve — when a summer in a biochemistry lab changed his trajectory entirely. He turned down his medical school acceptance and never looked back.
After graduate training at the Université de Sherbrooke, a postdoctoral fellowship in Thomas Südhof's Nobel Prize-winning lab (first at UT Southwestern in Dallas, then at Stanford) opened a new research direction: the molecular code governing synapse formation. A chance experiment — testing whether a cell adhesion molecule he was studying might bind to a GPCR — yielded a result that Südhof himself didn't believe at first. Both proteins, it turned out, were independently known to bind alpha-latrotoxin, the toxin from black widow spider venom. No one had thought to ask whether they interacted with each other. That question has defined Boucard's lab ever since.
Now at UNAM in Mexico City — where no lab was working on adhesion GPCRs when he arrived — he is building a research program that connects these colossal, largely orphan receptors to synapse specificity, addiction, autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and cancer. The conversation covers the science, the serendipitous path behind it, and what it looks like to pioneer a research field in a place no one expected.
- Why adhesion GPCRs are structurally unlike any other GPCR family — sprawling N-terminal domains, autoproteolytic processing, up to 1,000 amino acids — and what made them so difficult to work with for so long
- How alpha-latrotoxin from black widow spider venom became the unexpected clue connecting a cell adhesion molecule and a GPCR into the same intercellular complex
- What synapse formation reveals about adhesion GPCR function — and how addiction, autism, schizophrenia, and cancer all converge on the same receptor biology
- Why Boucard left Stanford and UT Southwestern to build a lab at UNAM, and what it means to recruit from scientific communities that larger institutions overlook
- The assays the lab uses to probe adhesion GPCR biology: BRET, FRET, microscopy, flow cytometry, and custom protein engineering strategies to solubilize membrane-anchored ligands
