Life in the Lab

October 3, 2016

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.

(Most of) The Lab!

Bob, per usual, losing a grape eating contest to Aviva

Trivia Champs!

A long day for Ralphie

before

after

July 27, 2016

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!

July 27, 2016

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!

June 10, 2016

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!

Regalia

Wrestled snake, now wrestles cake!

Graduation party

Toasts!

F1’s

Super-dicey party bus

June 3, 2016

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!

Ralph is all smiles!

April 1, 2016

Happy Brain Awareness Week 2016!!!!

As anyone who has visited the lab knows, a ton of the power under the hood comes from Northeastern Co-op students; this great program brings undergraduates from our neighbor on Huntington Avenue into the lab for stints that last from three months to years — one of the things we are proudest of is that these undergraduates become a key part of the scientific process, and participate fully in projects from conception to completion. So when the NE Co-ops asked Bob to be a guest speaker at the NE Brain Awareness Week he jumped! Sure, Taco Bell was eaten, a lecture was given, questions were answered, and shout-outs were given to all the NE students who work so hard in lab. But then the tables turned, and everyone went out to the local UG bar around the corner. Just for reference, that thing that we are all doing with the shot glasses that are glued to a ski….is called a shotski! Who knew?

Brain Awareness Cake

Yes, there was an actual lecture. Here Bob gestures the letter C because Neurobiology is Cool!

About halfway through.

Shotski with Natasha, Joe, Bob and Ralph

March 22, 2016

New Paper with the Adams lab…

…on the development and use of Structured Variational Autoencoders to better understand behavioral (and other classses) of data, posted today to the arXiv. The paper is super-cool – it describes a method to learn representations of complex time-series data (which are often non-linear) that are well-suited to structured models (using a Hidden Markov Model, for example). The approach could be used to solve many practical problems in modeling behavioral data, and we are really excited to try it on our 3D datasets. Congrats to Matt and Alex (and of course Ryan Adams) on their great work!

December 23, 2015

Happy Holidays 2015!

This was a hell of a year, and so the Datta lab (minus a few early departures for much-deserved vacation – Tari and Ralph, you were missed!) did it up – a little izakaya action, followed by vodka gimlets at Eastern Standard with the Sabatini, Harwell and Stevens labs. This is a true story: there was a live cockroach on our pickled vegetables, and after swapping it out, WE ALL KEPT EATING! Says a lot! Happy holidays to all – here’s looking forward to a great 2016.