….its intimate relationship with evolution. In addition to being the largest gene family in mammals, the odorant receptor genes are some of the fastest evolving. This suggests that perception is being sculpted on rapid timescales to enable individual species to detect and respond to those specific scents that are most critical for their survival and reproduction. Dan Bear (along with Jean Marc Lassance and Hopi Hoekstra) recently wrote a great review on what we can learn about smell by looking at evolutionary dynamics in Current Biology, which can be found here. It is part of a great review issue on evolution and the nervous system – check it out!
Congrats to Dan Bear, PhD!
A hearty mazeltov to Dan Bear, who recently gave a beautiful thesis defense and earned his PhD. Dan worked on the Ms4a genes, a new class of olfactory receptor he discovered (along with his colleague in the lab and benchmate, Paul Greer) that mediates sensory responses in the necklace olfactory subsystem (check out his super-cool paper here). In addition to being an amazing scientist, knowing at least two pluralizations of “octopus” that are not “octopuses” or the incorrect “octopi,” and the only person who really knows what is in Thom Yorke’s heart, Dan both set the bar really high for the lab and defined many of the problems we are working on now. Thankfully for us, he is sticking around for a few months to finish up the follow-up to the first Ms4a paper, so it is not goodbye yet – just congrats at a job well done!
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| Dan deftly answering questions at his defense |
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| The famous 10,000-word email |
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| Toasting good fortune and hard work |
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| Receiving the traditional lab gift |
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| Dan will be missed! |
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| Now, which brain is the pigeon? |
Greer, Bear et al featured on the MRC’s Biomedical Picture of the Week…
and can be found here. Note that the very next day the same blog posted a lovely pic from our friend Rachel Greenberg.
NIPS Trailer
Check out this terrific trailer for our upcoming NIPS abstract (with Alex Wiltschko, Matt Johnson, Ryan Adams and David Duvenaud) put together by David – it does a really nice job explaining the value of merging a model-based approach with neural nets. The combination allows clear articulation of model structure – and maintenance of semantic meaning – while simultaneously taking advantage of flexibly learned feature embeddings. We think this is going to be an important and general method for capturing structure in high-dimensional data. If you are at NIPS this year, check it out!
Dr. Tan!
Congratulations to Tari Tan for successfully defending her thesis! Tari did an amazing job explaining her work on the structure and function of the necklace olfactory system. We won’t even try to summarize Tari’s tenure in the lab, but her hard work, integrity, insight and sense of joy played an crucial role in making the lab what it is in spirit and in science. She has single-handedly re-written our thinking about the structural basis of olfactory perception – keep a weather-eye out for her work in the next few months, and you’ll see what we mean 🙂 We would bemoan her absence from our lives, but she is taking a job as the curriculum fellow for the Program in Neuroscience — she is going to be in charge of modernizing the way graduate students at Harvard learn about the brain — and she’ll be continuing (at least for a while) in the lab on the side. So this is not so much goodbye as it is a congratulations on an amazing job! Here’s to the newly minted Dr. Tan!
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| Tari making fun of Bob… |
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| …and Bob emphasizing how much Tari loves the Pats! |
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| Post-defense cake |
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| Since robes won’t be worn until the Spring, this will have to do for now |
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| Happy Graduation Tari! |
It is always sunny at the beach!
So here is another thing that really happened: after our annual beach trip (see pics below) we ended up at a bar on the North Shore in a group trivia contest. In the end, it came down to the Datta lab and some other group that turned out to be a bunch of researchers studying cnetophores….which of course don’t have real nervous systems! When all was said and done, the $50 worth of free buffalo wings to the winner was ours, Natch! Because our model organism can actually think.
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| (Most of) The Lab! |
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| Bob, per usual, losing a grape eating contest to Aviva |
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| Trivia Champs! |
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| A long day for Ralphie |
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| before |
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| after |
Cool explainer video for Greer et al paper….
…made by a bunch of enthusiastic science communicators for public consumption can be found below. It captures the spirit of the paper really nicely. Enjoy!
A new mechanism and logic for mammalian olfaction
A huge congrats to Paul and Dan (and to everyone else in the lab whose hard work helped with the story) on their recent publication on a new family of chemoreceptors expressed in the mouse olfactory system. This paper, published last month in Cell, revises the canonical view of how mammalian olfaction works by identifying a new receptor family (called the MS4As) that do not encode seven-transmembrane-containing g-protein coupled receptors (like all other known mammalian chemoreceptor families) but instead encode proteins with only four transmembrane domains. These receptors, which respond to a wide variety of ethologically-relevant odors, including attractive food cues and aversive pheromones, are all co-expressed in the neurons in which they are expressed. These observations, in additional to being incredibly provocative, raise all sorts of interesting questions now being addressed in the lab: about the role of the MS4As in sensory perception; about the modes of coding and decoding of sensory information in the “necklace” system, the subsystem in which the MS4As are expressed; about the brain circuits attached to MS4A-expressing neurons in the nose; and about the behavioral consequences of activating the MS4A receptors. Lots of great stuff in the paper itself, which you can check out here! You can see coverage of these findings here, here and here.
And Lisa Stowers wrote a really nice (and generous!) preview of the article for Cell found here!
Alex Graduates!
A heartfelt thanks and farewell to Alex Wiltschko, who graduated from the lab with his PhD this month. Alex was instrumental in many of our projects, but his thesis focused on developing new methods for behavioral classification, with the goal of using this information to better understand how genes and neural circuit activity change patterned action. You can check out his work here and here; keep an eagle eye out for more in the near future. Alex had an immeasurable influence on the lab in the best possible ways – he will be sorely missed. We wish him all the best, and look forward to his future scientific accomplishments. Congrats, Alex!
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| Regalia |
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| Wrestled snake, now wrestles cake! |
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| Graduation party |
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| Toasts! |
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| F1’s |
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| Super-dicey party bus |
UnderGRADUATION
Gaudeamus Igitur! Ralph Peterson, Kristen Drummey and Jesse Katon, three of our amazing Northeastern co-op students, just graduated from Northeastern. Lucky for us, all three are sticking around at least for a little while longer. Oh, and the folks at Northeastern gave Ralphie an award as best co-op! Congrats to all!
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| Ralph is all smiles! |