Datta Lab

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!

1949 science report card from Eton for Sir John Gurdon, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012

We have previously blogged about lab culture and mentorship; recently we learned of another nice collection of lab culture links curated by our friend, colleague, and upstairs neighbor Angela DePace – the link to her great website is here. Since summer leaves ample time for mulling, one can also consider some opposing viewpoints, including the acute unpacking of the classic Mentor/Tormentor dichotomy below.

So if you’ve stopped by the lab about a year ago you might have noticed something: it was crowded. Really really crowded. For complicated reasons when the lab opened it was half-size: perfect for getting started but not a lot of room to grow. Through the hard work and good faith of many, many people, the lab recently expanded. We now have plenty of space to work and grow and to do science in what the elder Dr. Datta would call the “proper manner.” The new digs include a dedicated chemical and perfusion room, a 200 sq. ft. suite for odor-driven behavioral analysis, a tissue culture and surgical suite with a stereotax-dedicated hood, an imaging room with two 12-foot tables, and a bunch of molecular space in the main lab. This new space is really essential to scientific progress for the lab, and so thanks are due to those who made this possible: Michael Greenberg, Janine Zieg, Mark Rose, the folks in Building A, Danny and the Wescor guys, and both the Systems and Micro departments for being so understanding and flexible. The only bad thing about this is that it comes as part of a massive rearrangement of labs on the Harvard Quad, which means we will soon lose our good friends in the Starnbach lab as our neighbors (sniff…). Please come by and check it out – we love to show visitors around!

View of the main lab from the new side to the old.

New picture window with fancy pants PCR machines.

Inverse light cycle behavioral suite

Imaging room with the backs of the two multiphoton rigs – calcium imaging rig on second table.

View into new TC/Surgery room. Now Tari can listen to KISS108 in peace.

Basically this was a two-fer – Tari Tan totally crushed her PQE (one reviewer called it a “model defense”) on her project working on behaviorally relevant circuits in the peripheral olfactory system, and, as if we needed an excuse, the Harvard-themed science movie Losing Control opened (confession: the director of the movie, Valerie Weiss, was a classmate of Bob’s in graduate school). So we decamped to Kendall Square, got sloshed cheering Tari’s good fortune and skill, and, well, most of us made it through the movie. One way or another, a good time was had by all – congrats Tari!

Normally we try to limit our blog posts to those directly relevant to the lab, but this was just too cool to pass up. Check out this amazing interactive program for exploring the scale of objects ranging from quantum foam on the small end to the totality of the observable universe on the large end here. It obviously owes much to the Eames’ beautiful short film The Powers of Ten, a favorite from childhood linked below. One of the neat things about the program is that you get to play around with scale directly, although it is less effective at conveying one of the cooler insights in the Eames’ movie, which is that there are lots of scales at which nearly nothing exists.