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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!

A big Datta lab welcome to our two newest members – postdoctoral fellow Andrew Giessel and rotation student Alex Wiltschko. Andrew comes to us after a fantastic run as a graduate student doing synaptic physiology in Bernardo Sabatini’s lab, and will work on in vivo optical imaging and electrophysiological characterization of behaviorally-relevant structures in the basal forebrain. He also rocks a sweet tattoo of a wheat stalk (recalling his Kansas roots) that looks just like a pyramidal neuron. Alex, who is joining a project to optogenetically manipulate olfactory cortex, hails from Texas and has as whole side career writing technical iPhone Apps (including an excellent spectral analyzer). Welcome to them both!

Alex performing bimanual molecular biology

Andrew thinking hard about what to image next

…for winning the Nancy Lurie Marks Foundation Fellowship! This award, which runs for three years, will be used to fund Paul’s postdoctoral project developing in vivo approaches to identify specific odorant receptors for behaviorally-relevant scents.