Keiko Kanamori

Keiko Kanamori obtained her Ph.D. in chemistry at California Institute of Technology in 1980 with Dr. John D. Roberts who was one of the pioneers of N-15 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. After postdoctoral experience in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at University of California, Los Angeles, she joined Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) Laboratory at Huntington Medical Research Institutes in 1989. Through joint efforts by K. Kanamori and Dr. Brian D. Ross, the Director of MRS Laboratory, and with support from HMRI, the first in vivo N-15 MRS study of glutamate-glutamine metabolism in rat brain was developed. The project, funded by National Institute of Health from 1994-2001, clarified the rates at which glutamate is synthesized from its precursors glutamine and leucine in vivo. This was followed by kinetic study of the flux of glutamate through the glial and neuronal intracellular compartments and the vesicular compartment from which the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate is released into synaptic fluid for neurotransmission. The study used in vivo C-13 MRS to monitor intracellular glutamate flux, and a combination of microdialysis and gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry to collect and analyze the C-13 enrichment of extracellular glutamate.

Her current joint project with Dr. Ross, funded by National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes during 2006-2010, focuses on the role of glutamate excitotoxicity in kainate-induced rat model of epilepsy, which most closely resembles human temporal-lobe epilepsy. Correlation between spontaneous epileptic seizures, monitored by EEG, and changes in extracellular glutamate and glutamine concentrations and their C-13 enrichments are studied, with the aim of clarifying whether it is excessive release of neurotransmitter glutamate or its impaired uptake into glia that is the major cause of epileptic seizures.