He holds concurrent appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Cell and Developmental Biology in the School of Medicine. After receiving his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Idaho in 1966, Soderling pursued his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Washington and graduated in 1970. He arrived at the Vollum in 1991 after seventeen years at Vanderbilt Medical School as a professor of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics. From 1976 to 1989, he was an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Intracellular calcium is vital to many regulatory pathways inside cells.
Mammalian cells contain a protein called calmodulin, which has a very high affinity for binding calcium. The regulatory properties of these CaM-kinases are being studied in response to alterations of intracellular calcium in cultured brain cells. Soderling and his colleagues are looking at the effects of one of the kinases, CaM-kinase II, on synaptic plasticity, a cellular memory process by which repeated stimuli increase the signal strength in a neural pathway. Intracellular calcium may also initiate events that lead to long term memory through new gene expression. Soderling and his coworkers are collaborating with Richard Goodman to explore the involvement of another type of protein kinase, CaM-kinase IV, in turning on selected genes in response to elevated concentrations of calcium.