Charles Zuker

Charles S. Zuker is a Chilean molecular geneticist and neurobiologist.

Zuker is a Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics and a Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University.

Zuker was born in Arica, Chile in 1957.

He attended el Colegio San Marcos in Arica, and later el Colegio San Ignacio in Santiago.

In 1973, he moved to Viña del Mar to study Biology at the Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso in Chile, where he worked as an undergraduate student in the labs of Roberto Gonzalez and Sergio Marshall.

He then went to graduate school at MIT where he obtained his Ph.D. with Harvey Lodish.

Zuker did his postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley with Gerald Rubin.

In 1987, he accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego.

He has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1989.

In 1989 he was given tenure and appointed an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Beginning in the late 1990s Zuker and Ryba identified and characterized the receptors and the cells mediating each of the five basic taste modalities: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami.

They then demonstrated that individual taste receptor cells are tuned to encode individual taste qualities, and are hardwired to trigger innate behaviors (like attraction to sweet and aversion to bitters).

2001 Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

In 2003, Zuker and Ryba were the first to use targeted expression of a novel receptor (RASSL) to activate a neural circuit in a behaving mouse, and profoundly changed its behavior: By expressing RASSL in sweet or bitter taste receptor cells they could drive the animal to be attracted, or averse, to the otherwise tasteless RASSL ligand.

In a set of milestone studies exploring the peripheral and central coding of taste, and combining molecular genetics, physiology, imaging, animal behavior, and optical control of neural circuits, Zuker and collaborators identified the circuits driving responses to the different taste stimuli, and showed that by manipulating the neurons representing sweet and bitter taste in the brain they could directly control an animal’s internal representation, sensory perception, and behavioral actions.

Zuker’s laboratory has also helped uncover the fundamental difference between liking sweet (i.e. the role of the taste system, activated by both sugars and artificial sweeteners) and wanting sugar (i.e. the strong desire for sugar).

They showed that, in addition to the tongue, sugar acts in the gut to activate a novel neural circuit that communicates to the brain the presence of sugar.

This gut-to-brain communication axis (also-known-as the gut-brain axis) is not activated by artificial sweeteners and functions as the principal conduit driving preference for sugar.

Prior to working on mammalian taste, his lab focused on signal transduction pathways in Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), including vision, mechanotransduction and thermosensation.

2004 Elected Member, National Academy of Sciences

2006 Elected member, National Academy of Medicine

Prior to moving to Columbia University in 2009, he was the Kevin and Tamara Kinsella Chair of Neurobiology and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine.

In addition to his academic appointments at the University of California and at Columbia University, Zuker was a Senior Fellow at the Janelia Research Campus from 2009-2017.

His lab, in collaboration with Nick Ryba at the NIH, have transformed our understanding of mammalian taste.

2014 Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science