The first two Great Lakes GPCR Retreats, in 1999 and 2000, were held in London, Ontario (halfway between Toronto and Detroit), and brought together labs from Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, and upstate New York. Subsequent GPCR Retreats have taken place at various locales along the St. Lawrence Seaway, with the meeting returning to London in 2007. By then this local get-together had come to garner international recognition, albeit while still retaining the informal flavor of a lab meeting. While speakers (and attendees) now come to the retreat from far and wide, the goal remains to provide an interface between students, postdoctoral fellows, academics, and industrial scientists.
This marks the first time that speakers at the annual Great Lakes GPCR Retreat were asked to contribute articles for a collection to appear in a journal. We are honored to present this collection and extremely grateful to Terry Kenakin and the staff at the Journal of Receptors and Signal Transduction for providing such as excellent venue. We think the articles included in this special issue highlight the diversity of both the questions being asked and the experimental approaches being used to tease out the complicated biology of G protein-coupled receptors. We begin with an overview of the meeting itself and continue with a series of focused reviews on subjects presented by a number of the speakers. It bears noting that the recent buzz created by the publication of the different crystal structures of the β 2AR also resonated at the GPCR Retreat this year as Brian Kobilka presented the structures publicly for the very first time. With that, we also note that the next meeting, which will be held October 16–18 in Bromont, Québec, may also hold some surprises. The Great Lakes GPCR Retreat, strongly associated with the annual symposia of the “Club des récepteurs à 7 domaines transmembranaires du Québec,” has become somewhat of a tradition that many of us look forward to attending each year. We hope that this issue of JRST also marks the beginning of a new tradition as well.
Peter Chidiac is an associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Western Ontario. The current focus of his laboratory is to identify and characterize novel functions of regulator of G protein signaling (RGS) proteins and to ascertain how these contribute to GPCR signaling. Outside of the lab, he likes to experiment in the kitchen.
Terry Hébert is an associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill University. When not enjoying the odd single malt, Dr. Hébert is interested in GPCR signaling specificity. His work is based on the notion that distinct stable receptor-based signaling complexes are formed during receptor biosynthesis and contain G proteins, effectors, and possibly other regulatory molecules as well.