He entered State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate as an

MD-PhD trainee, but as science was his passion, he completed only his PhD, focusing on the neuroanatomic analysis of visual projections. In 1978, he moved to NYU for his postdoctoral fellowship. At this time, the Department of Cell Biology at Veliparib in vivo NYU, under the leadership of David Sabatini, was in the vanguard of elucidating mechanisms of membrane protein biosynthesis and trafficking. Dave credited this fellowship and Sabatini with introducing him to myelinating glia as a spectacular model of cell polarity and membrane biogenesis. The strong cell biological perspective he acquired at NYU was a hallmark of Dave’s work throughout his career.

During this fellowship, Dave investigated the pathways of myelin protein biosynthesis. This resulted in a beautiful, foundational paper (Colman et al., 1982) that demonstrated that specific myelin proteins are synthesized on either ER-bound or free polysomes BKM120 research buy and, accordingly, follow different routes to the myelin sheath. Unexpectedly, he also found that mRNAs for the major proteins were differentially distributed in the oligodendrocyte, i.e., PLP and MBP mRNAs were enriched in the oligodendrocyte soma versus processes, respectively. This was a striking, early example of the phenomenon of local mRNA translation: a finding that helped establish that segregation and delivery of mRNAs, and their translation products, are an important general phenomenon in mammalian cells. This early work impressed many in the myelin field, including two of us (P.J.B. and J.L.S.) sufficiently that we went to NYU in 1984 in order to work with Dave, who was just starting L-NAME HCl his own laboratory. It is a testament to the happy and productive atmosphere of the fledgling Colman laboratory that, despite or perhaps because the three of us shared a 9 foot laboratory bench for the better part of a year, this

experience was the foundation of lifelong friendships and a series of coauthored publications (most recently, Tait et al., 2000). A later visit to Scotland, during one such collaboration, stimulated Dave’s interest in all matters Scotch and culminated some years later in a visit to New Jersey to acquire a sheep’s stomach in order to cook authentic haggis for Robbie Burns Night. While it took some time for the smell to clear, the good spirits survived even this. In starting his own laboratory, David set out to clone several key myelin proteins using the recently described lambda GT11 system expression cloning system (Young and Davis, 1983). This was an early, exciting era in cloning, prior to kits or PCR.