Congratulations to our colleague, friend and neighbor Steve Liberles and his student David Ferrero for their recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which can be found here. They use a clever combination of chemistry, cell-based screens, imaging and behavioral analysis to implicate a specific chemical that is enriched in carnivore urine – 2-phenylethylamine – in driving the avoidance of mice to predators. Our own Stan Pashkovski contributed to the behavioral analysis in the paper as part of a fruitful ongoing collaboration with the Liberles lab. A great summary of this work is up on the HMS Systems Biology Blog, with more coverage from Nature News.