Datta Lab

…then check out the latest paper from the lab in this week’s issue of Neuron! The paper describes a new technology for behavioral characterization and classification that combines 3D machine vision with recently developed approaches in unsupervised machine learning. This combined method can be used to objectively characterize mouse behavior in a wide variety of circumstances, and to identify changes in action induced after manipulations of the environment, the genome or neural activity; as such, this approach promises to provide fundamental insight into the complex relationships between the genome, neural activity and patterns of action. We are currently using this method in the lab in a wide array of experiments, ranging from characterizing naturalistic patterns of odor-driven behavior in rodents to trying to identify nodes within corticostriatal circuits responsible for behavioral sequencing. Congrats to Alex, Matt and others in the lab who contributed to the paper!

(PDF can be found under the “Publications” tab, and further discussion in the “Research” section).

Thank god that is over! 30,000 people, and a seemingly equal number of posters. Also answered was the question: how many slices of deep dish can one eat in a week? Stan, Alex and Ralphie did a great job sharing their data with the community, our colleagues Bernardo and Beth gave fantastic plenary talks, and it was terrific to see Mike and Carla win the Gruber prize. Enough to make this an annual event? Maybe…..

Alex, somewhere in the scrum, talking about our new 3D behavioral analysis technology

Blurry but well-earned: Carla and Mike accepting the Gruber prize!

I appreciate the frankness of the vomit fee in Chicago cabs

Ralphie’s first real meeting poster

A hearty N’ Sync farewell to our intrepid now former lab manager, Ally Nowlan! Ally was an amazing member of the lab and our backbone for several years – we wish her that absolute best of luck as she starts grad school with the Cold Spring Harbor crew in neurobiology. Steve Shea has already been warned!

To celebrate her contributions to the lab and her new career as a graduate student, we did a little karaoke. We learned that, no matter where in the world you come from, you almost certainly enjoy drunk singing to Bohemian Rhapsody. We also welcomed our new lab manager, Neha Bhagat, who until recently was an undergraduate at Northeastern and had spent time in the Datta lab diligently injecting the brains of animals with viruses, amongst other things. Ally you will be missed – keep in touch, and good luck with everything! And a hearty welcome to Neha!

Ally wishing us all Bye Bye Bye

Neha, with pipette at the ready!

…come to this great smell meeting organized by Anne Marie Oswald and Bob at UCSB in collaboration with the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics this summer. Should be a blast, and at least part of the Datta lab will represent. Going to be a blast!

The Datta Lab (plus a couple F1s), at Good Harbor Beach.

Waiting for the lobster rolls. You can’t really tell, but it is COLD!

New Postdoc Tatsuya. Not on TV (yet).

Summer Student Max. Currently on TV.

A happy fall (and end of summer) from the Datta lab! Lots has happened in the last 18 months (the approximate timescale upon which this blog currently operates), nearly none of which was documented, so this is an attempt to compress some of the highlights into a single blog entry. MUCH will be left unsaid – our apologies to those affected by any oversights.

First, we went to the beach (see above)! This was awesome, since the rip tides were in full effect and the waves were like something out of the movie Sharknado. We didn’t lose anyone, and those that stuck it out ended up playing mini-golf on Route 1 in Saugus in front of a plastic green dinosaur. Totally worth it.

Second, the awards roll – postdoc Giuliano Iurilli won a prestigious Human Frontiers fellowship to work in the lab on the striatum, graduate student Tari Tan netted an F31 NRSA for her work on non-canonical olfactory systems, new postdoc Tatsuya Tsukahara joined us from the University of Tokyo (where he did spectacular work in developmental molecular biology in Hiroyuki Takeda’s and Yoshi Watanabe’s labs) armed with a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science fellowship, and Bob was recently named a Vallee Foundation Young Investigator.

Third, postdoc Andrew Giessel wrote a really nice review on odor coding and circuit function different olfactory regions in the brain, linked here. Check it out!

Finally, the lab also got bigger, despite the fact that Dan recently decided that aerobic exercise is a “thing” and Bob has more or less stayed low carb. Joining our awesome Northeastern Co-op student Ralph Peterson (who has been working with Alex on behavior) are three more Co-op students – Jesse Katon (also working on new methods for behavioral analysis), Neha Bhagat and Alex Williams (both working to deliver optogenetic reagents to across the olfactory cortical mantle). This summer saw us visited by Max Burkholder, who plays Max Braverman on the TV show Parenthood, and who worked with Ally doing molecular biology. All these new people needed some place to work so we (temporarily) built a lab expansion next to our new colleague Matt Pecot’s lab to get some elbow room.

OK, enough blogging for now. Back to science!

So, I know many of you have been asking yourselves – What is up with the Datta Lab? Why are no updates on the blog? Well I’m here to tell you – we’ve been BUSY!!!! So, to prevent an excessive information/blog post ratio, and to make it easier for us to tell y’all wassup, we are going to do a multipost recounting of  what we did in the last year starting…..sometime next week. For now, know that lots of interesting and cool changes have been afoot (new folks, new experiments, new neighbors), and let us wish you the best new year possible in the best way possible:

A crazy Datta Lab 2012 it has definitely been – overall the science has taken a fortuitous left turn into a strange, unexplored and really interesting place, and we have been joined in our efforts in the wilderness by a bunch of talented new folks from across the globe (more about them to come!). At celebrate all the hard work for our holiday party we decamped to a Teppan-Yaki-style restaurant before joining, as is traditional, the Stevens and Sabatini labs at Eastern Standard for further dipsomaniacal debauchery; all you need to know is that the phrase “More Sake More Fun!” was uttered more than once, and that Bob can only drink for about 4 seconds from a squirt bottle. Others did significantly better! Best wishes from all of us for a great and productive 2013!

Jonny is Judas

…for the Datta lab, as we passed another milestone: our first in vivo cellular recordings!

Andrew, with our first in vivo gigaseal…

…and moments later, our first whole-cell recording!

For the annual Datta lab spooky-fest this year, we made our way to Canobie Lake Park in the swing state of New Hampshire. Definitely scarier than last year, thanks, we think, to the enormous volumes of artificial fog pumped out by what must be the one machine singularly responsible for anthropogenic global warming. In addition to the haunted houses, there were all sorts of putatively non-spooky things to do which were in fact, when we think hard about it, pretty spooky. Check out the pics below and of course the video of the aptly named mini-KISS!

Datta lab in front of the Ghostbusters-mobile. Who are you going to call?

Datta lab Whack-a-Mole

Scared of Heights

Strangest Moment of Night: Ally and her New Hampshire Doppelganger in line together!

Oktoberfest?

Masha, plotting and planning

Tari, gracious in Whack-a-Mole victory

Mini-KISS

OK, not really. But a bit of code written by our own Alex Wiltschko did (accidentally?) get featured on Showtime’s Homeland this week. Admittedly this has little to do with the lab, except that the coolness points Alex earned might offset the demerits he received for flying business class on the same flight at Bob to SfN. Apparently Alex really enjoyed the warm nuts and creamed mushroom soup…and Bob enjoyed somewhat less the $18 worth of cold sandwiches he bought and ate back in coach. Check out screenshot below!