Datta Lab

Back in the spring Bob gave a public lecture as part of the Harvard Medical School Longwood Lecture Series, which is intended to bring the science and medicine done at HMS to a community audience – the series in which Bob took part included talks about each of the five senses. Video of this lecture, which includes the Department of Neurobiology’s own Marge Livingstone talking about vision, and our good friend Steve Liberles talking about taste, is below. Note that for a variety of copyright-related and other reasons this video has been heavily edited by the HMS public affairs office, including the substitution of a number of slides (making the talks look uglier than they really were) and the deletion of a really cool optogenetics experiment at the end of Bob’s talk.

A big year for the Datta lab – we gained a new lab manager (Allison), a new tech (Ally), and three new graduate students (Dan, Alex and Tari). In addition to getting real some scientific traction on a bunch of fronts (more about that to come!), the long-awaited lab expansion finally started (more about that to come!). To celebrate all of this and more we decamped to Citizen Public House for their traditional pig roast, before joining the Stevens lab and the Sabatini lab for drinks at Eastern Standard. We got cut off by the bartender, which, in retrospect, was probably deserved. We’ll leave off 2011 with perhaps the best rendition of any holiday song, ever – enjoy, and Happy Holidays to all!

The Datta lab, before the pork. And most of the drinking.

Our pig!!!

…Bob and George Patterson have recently written an aptly titled review for Current Opinion in Neurobiology entitled “Optical Highlighter Molecules in Neurobiology.” Links to text on the Publications page and here at the CON website.

El Bulli chef and culinary genius Ferran Adria stopped by the lab last week – he wanted to see a bit of science, and was in town for the Harvard Science and Cooking lecture series, and so arranged visits to a handful of HMS labs.  Adria and Bob chatted for a bit about olfactory and taste perception – he was particularly taken with the relatively recent findings from Leslie Vosshall and Hiro Matsunami demonstrating that olfactory receptor polymorphisms underlie different perceptual responses to androstenone. After mulling it over a bit, he decided that our lab needed a new motto — “no hay alimentos raros, sólo la gente raro” which translates roughly into “there are no strange foods, only strange people.” We agree!


Afterwards, Tari Tan and Stan Pashkovski did a great job recapitulating the parts of the seminal Lin and Katz experiment that showed that the functional representation for the odor of whole cloves contains within it the component functional responses to the individual odors found within clove headspace. Adria seemed to get a kick out of it – all in all, potentially the coolest day in lab ever!

Blurry pic of Ferran Adria in the scope room with Tari and Bob during the functional imaging experiment.

Bob and Ferran Adria in the lab.

Dan Bear passed his PQE. Ally Nowlan, a recent UMass Amherst grad who did a thesis exploring the function of the technotrousers gene in zebrafish spinal neurons,  joined the lab as our new technician (filling the shoes of Allison, who recently got promoted to lab manager).  How, you ask, could we possibly celebrate these epic events in the wet and overly-sugared month of October? With a trip to the Fear at Fenway, a new local outpost for Spookyworld! While not nearly as amygdala-tickling as last year’s trip to the actual Spookyworld, it did have one amazing surprise in the middle – as you exited the second haunted house through a claustrophobia-inducing tunnel, you were ejected onto the playing field at Fenway, a truly spectacular experience.

Dan, celebrating his good fortune, and Ally, wondering whether her experience in the Datta lab is going to be equally Spooky.

The lab, on the actual track behind center field in Fenway!

Our old friend Carl Zimmer has just published a super-cool coffee table book of science tattoos called Science Ink (in which Bob is featured) –

– the book has also been featured on NPR’s Studio 360, which interviewed Bob and a bunch of other tattooed scientists. The story can be heard here. Definitely check out the book – it is amazing how much cool ink is hidden away by lab coats!

UPDATE: More Science Ink coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, NPR’s Science Friday and our personal favorite, the Times of India.

Masha, our incomparable lab manager, is leaving us for graduate school. Although she is blessedly not going too far – she secured admission to the Harvard Program in Neuroscience and will start in a few weeks – the loss of her sane presence in the lab will be keenly felt. She was the lab’s first employee, and basically built the place from the ground up; we will miss her terribly and wish her only the best as she trains to become an independent scientist. We are joined by two new folks to help fill the hole that will be left when Masha departs: Sara Onvani, our new lab manager, who comes to us after getting her master’s degree in cancer biology at the University of Toronto, and Allison Petrosino, a recent Wellesley College grad who studied computer science and neuroscience and will work as a technician. To celebrate Masha and her contributions to the lab we, at her suggestion, went to a Russian banquet hall, where, quite honestly, the only purpose of the food is to serve as a solute for the vodka. We will miss you, M!

Masha Before

A new day dawns – E-Phys is being done in the Datta Lab for the first time! We are sure that, somewhere, H. Gobind Khorana is softly weeping.

Andrew and the Spikes!

…and so we decided to play hooky and go to the beach for the day. Of course, we needed an excuse, which in this case was pretty easy: Tari Tan and Alex Wiltschko have joined the lab as new graduate students! Tari is currently imaging the olfactory bulb and doing optogenetics in the cortex, while Alex will focus on developing new experimental paradigms for studying odor-driven behavior.

Alex and Tari, the newest students in the Datta lab. Will they stay this happy?

We decamped to Crane’s Beach on the North Shore, stopping first at Woodman’s for some seriously delish fried clams and lobster rolls. A really great time was had by all: the weather certainly cooperated – the water temperature was 60 degrees F, the ambient temperature was 104 degrees F – and to prevent melting we spent the entire time in the ocean. We will give away our million-dollar idea right here: someone has GOT to invent a way to play water bocce.

All of us, pre-heatstroke. This is the only shot of the bunch where somebody wasn’t photobombing us from behind.

….and with summer comes summer students! We have two great students with us this summer, both from abroad. The first is Leen Al-Hafaz, who comes to us courtesy of our good friend and colleague Ben Shykind. Leen is a newly-minted medical student at the Weill Cornell Medical School in Qatar, and will be working with Dan and Paul on olfactory transcriptomics for the summer. The other is Luigi Federico Rossi, who joins us from the University of Pisa and comes to us courtesy of a Giovanni Armenise Foundation summer fellowship. Luigi, who actually goes by Federico, is affectionately called Rico in the lab, for reasons obvious to all who are fans of the early 90s Equadorian hitmaker Gerardo. He will also work with Dan and Paul. Welcome to both!

Federico and Leen rocking it on our new qPCR machine.