Datta Lab

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.

The Datta lab has been awarded its first RO1 award from the National Institutes of Deafness and Communications Disorders. This five-year grant — the workhorse funding mechanism used by the NIH in the biomedical sciences — will support the lab’s efforts to probe the general structure and functional architecture of neural circuits within the olfactory bulb and within regions of the olfactory cortex. Bob was also recently awarded a McKnight Scholars Award and a Searle Scholars Award, which was recently covered in the Harvard Focus. These awards are given to young investigators to kick start their independent research programs, and are intended to fund high-risk, high-reward projects; the McKnight will be used to explore the new potential molecular mechanisms for odor sensation in the sensory periphery, and the Searle to characterize functional responses to odors in higher olfactory centers.

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.

The number of pieces of Korean fried chicken eaten at Bon Chon to celebrate Stan’s passing of his Preliminary Qualifying Exam and Dan Bear’s joining the lab. Of note in this context, the chicken was evenly split between soy and spicy. Other relevant statistics: 7 (the number of lab members in attendance), 1:20 (the ratio between beer pitchers and chicken pieces consumed) and 1 (collective number of trivia questions answered correctly at the White Horse Tavern trivia night while the lab was sidled up to the bar after dinner).

A subset of the total lab allotment of chicken. You can almost smell the deliciousness, no?

Dan and Stan after dinner. Dan is lucky he is  looking at the camera.

Big Ups to Dan Bear, who was recently awarded a three-year National Science Foundation fellowship to support his work in the lab on the transcriptomics of neurons in the olfactory system.  PIN student (and former roton) Alex Wiltschko also bagged one of the prizes. Per the NSF website, “The ranks of NSF Fellows include individuals who have made transformative breakthroughs in science and engineering research and have become leaders in their chosen careers and Nobel laureates.”

Check out our latest paper, published today in the journal Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09868.html

The paper describes efforts to trace neural projections from single glomeruli within the mouse olfactory bulb to their targets in the cortex; our data reveal that different regions of the olfactory cortex receive distinct patterns of projection (ranging from totally diffuse to stereotyped and segregated), suggesting that each region of the olfactory cortex may play a unique role in building odor percepts and facilitating odor-driven behaviors.

This paper represents the collaborative efforts of the Axel and Datta labs, and in particular the work of a spectacular graduate student of Richard’s, Dara Sosulski. Congrats to all!