Datta Lab

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.

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!