When selecting fluorescent proteins (FPs), it is standard practice to select FPs with the highest in vitro brightness. However, it is well-known that in vitro brightness does not…
News from 2019
The Brain Representation of Social Information [Dulac and Murthy Labs]
Behaviors such as mating, territorial defense, parenting or predator avoidance, despite being instinctive, are modulated by social experience. Because instinctive behaviors can be elicited without any previous social…
Postdoc Profile: Fatma Zehra Yildiz [D’Souza Lab]
Anyone lucky enough to be invited over for lunch with postdoctoral fellow Fatma Zehra Yildiz of Victoria D’Souza’s lab should accept immediately. Whoever does will be treated to…
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Neuron: Watching Newborn Neurons Grow Up in the Adult Brain [Murthy Lab]
Sensory systems must be adaptive to allow animals to cope with changing environments. For hundreds of years, neuroscientists thought that neural plasticity came from changes in the connections…
Controlling Organellar Excess: Msp1 Eliminates Undesired Membrane Proteins from Mitochondria and Peroxisomes [Denic Lab]
The phrase “finding a needle in a haystack” refers to the difficulty of locating a specific target among a large number of very similar objects. Living cells face…
New MCB Professor Electrifies Proteomics
Doeke R. Hekstra, MCB’s new Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and an Assistant Professor of Applied Physics for SEAS, came to Harvard with an unorthodox plan…
Channeling Anti-viral Immunity [Hunter Lab]
The discovery of RNA interference (RNAi) in 1998 was one of the most unexpected findings in the last 30 years. The Nobel-winning observations were made in C. elegans,…
Mother May I? Inheritance of Silencing Signals in C. elegans [Hunter Lab]
RNA interference (RNAi) is a nearly ubiquitous gene silencing phenomenon triggered by introduced double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). In some animals, including the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, RNAi is systemic, which…
How Do Environmental Stimuli Set Individual Circadian Clocks to Stochastic Phases? [O’Shea Lab]
Many organisms on earth have evolved an endogenous self-sustained pacemaker, called the circadian clock, to anticipate daily changes in the environment and adapt its physiology. The circadian clock…
Turning the ON off: Sculpting One of Two Dendritic Branches in a Retinal Neuron [Sanes Lab]
The dendritic arbors of neurons are incredibly diverse in size and shape. This makes sense, because dendritic morphology is a critical determinant of the numbers and types of…
