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Tag: Venkatesh Murthy

Smelling Complexity [ Murthy Lab]

You walk into a restaurant and immediately become aware of all the smells coming from the kitchen. These scents arise from small, volatile molecules called odorants. While there…

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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…

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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…

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Inaugural Harvard B4 Fellowship Opens New Doors for Postdocs

One year ago when Parvathi Sreekumar earned her PhD in Crop Physiology at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore, India, she never would have guessed that today…

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Building Budding Brain Biologists: Harvard’s Inaugural B4 Program in India

In the gleaming academic fortress of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, India, MCB professor Venkatesh Murthy and Advisor/Preceptor Laura Magnotti spent two weeks over…

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A SOLUTION TO THE OLFACTORY COCKTAIL PARTY PROBLEM [MURTHY LAB]

How good are we at detecting a specific smell in a mixture of smells – for example, the fragrance of a stargazer lily in a large bouquet of…

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FOLLOW YOUR NOSE….. BUT NOT ALWAYS [MURTHY LAB]

Animals balance efficiency and flexibility during natural behavior to make their decisions in different contexts. In a recent study published in Current Biology (PDF) the Murthy lab has…

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HOW THE SEROTONIN SYSTEM INFLUENCES SENSORY PROCESSING [MURTHY LAB]

Brains process external information rapidly at a sub-second time scale, which is set by the dynamic electrophysiological properties of neurons and the fast communication within neuronal populations. This…

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VENKI MURTHY ORGANIZES OLFACTORY SUMMIT IN SANTA BARBARA

Venki Murthy returned this week from his summer "vacation" in balmy Santa Barbara, CA, where he coordinated an eight-week program on the ins and outs of olfaction. Hosted…

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