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There are two fundamentally different forms of sensory information that are being processed by the brain. The form that is more commonly studied – also the form that neuroscientists mostly worry about - is the kind that tells the organism what is happening in the world. This is the neural activity that gets evoked by changes in the environment due to all possible kinds of physical or biological events. We live, after all, in a constantly changing world and it clearly helps to be informed speedily of these changes. A large part of neuroscience has to do with the study of how this sensory evoked activity is represented at different stages of processing in the brain and how it gets filtered for optimal extraction of the information that is most relevant for the generation of adaptive behaviors. [more]
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The bacterium Escherichia coli decides whether life is getting better or worse by swimming about and comparing measurements of concentrations of chemicals made over the past second with similar measurements made a few seconds earlier. If the concentrations of chemicals that the cell likes are going up, the cell tends to keep swimming in the same direction; if not, it tries a new direction, more or less at random. [more]
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How do zebras get their stripes and leopards their spots? Why is the human heart located on the left and the liver on the right? In 1952 Alan Turing proposed the reaction-diffusion model to explain how such complex patterns might emerge during development. In this model, an activator activates both itself and an inhibitor (“reaction”), and the activator is less diffusive than the inhibitor (“diffusion”). Turing, Gierer and Meinhardt showed that the specific interactions of activator and inhibitor could lead to a wide variety of patterns. [more]
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The National Science Foundation has offered four MCB graduate students its Graduate Research Fellowship, and three others received honorable mentions. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awardees are Nichole Collins (G2, Murray Lab), Jonathan Russell (G1), Carolina Salguero (G1), Philip Shiu (G2, Hunter Lab). Russell is declining his NSF award and accepting two fellowships from the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowships Program and the Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship Program. The three graduate students who received GRFP honorable mentions are Olga Minkina (G2, Mango Lab), Joe Piechura (G1) and Nick Weir (G2, Denic Lab). [more]
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- NEWS ARCHIVE -
2011
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The annual John M. Prather Lectures in Biology will be presented by Svante Pääbo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.One of the founders of paleogentics, Pääbo developed methods for retrieving and analyzing DNA sequences from archaeological and paleontological remains. He applies these methods to elucidate the history of ancient humans, and Pleistocene mammals, and to compare the genomes of modern humans, our earlier ancestors, and our closest relatives, the apes. He is known for his 2002 discovery of the “language gene” (FOXP2) that may be mutated in language disabilities, as well as for a collaborative effort to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. In 2010, Pääbo and his colleagues concluded, to widespread surprise, that Neanderthals had interbred with humans in Europe. He also proposes that a new species of hominins (a term that means humans and their ancestors) also contributed to the genomes of humans living outside of Africa, overturning traditional theories of human history. [more]
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On Saturday, April 21, the second Engineering and Physical Biology (EPB) Symposium will be held in Room B103 of the Northwest Building, 52 Oxford St. Speakers from constituent fields -Physics, Engineering, Chemistry and Molecular Biology - will present significant recent findings that range from single molecule studies to investigations of collective cell behavior. [more]
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Ron Vale, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, will give the 2012 John T. Edsall Lecture on Tuesday, April 17th, on “The Mechanism of Signaling by the T cell Receptor”. [more]
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Microbes (including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protists) are ubiquitous on earth and affect every part of our lives. Yet they are mostly invisible, and the vast majority of microbes are still unknown to us. On Saturday, April 14th, eight prominent microbial scientists hailing from a wide variety of disciplines will share their investigations into these enigmatic microbes during the Ninth Annual Microbial Sciences Symposium. This all-day event, which is free and open to the public, is hosted by the Harvard MSI and will be held in the Radcliffe Gymnasium at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies on the Cambridge campus. [more]
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The retina is a lot more complicated than a simple camera. In fact, it acts more like a parallel processing computer, with specialized neural circuits devoted to extracting particular aspects of the visual scene such as color, the flickering of light, or motion in a particular direction. To extract all this information, the retina has over 70 subtypes of neurons that each plays a specific role in one or more of these parallel circuits. We are studying how the developing retina makes all of these different neuronal subtypes, and how they are wired together properly so they can do their appropriate job. [more]
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How does a sensory neuron in an animal’s snout or insect’s antenna choose one Odorant Receptor (Or) gene to express from a genomic catalog of Or genes sometimes numbering in the thousands? Most genomes have large repertoires of Or genes, but an individual neuron typically expresses just one or a few. And the neurons that express the same Odorant receptor gene are usually scattered across sensory organs, interspersed with neurons that express different Or genes; the resulting olfactory epithelia are ‘crazy quilts’ of chemical sensitivities. Moreover, these patterns are not precise but vary considerably from one individual to another. One model put forward to explain the development of these Odorant receptor patterns is that each neuron pretty much makes an autonomous and stochastic receptor choice, while precluding the activation of any others. [more]
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Even with the most powerful optical microscopes, biologists who study living cells and the tiny structures within them have been unable to discern objects below a certain size – the “Abbe limit” proposed in the 19th Century. But in the past few years, the advent of new “superresolution” microscopes has bent, if not broken, that barrier, giving scientists breathtaking views of living cells in unprecedented detail. [more]
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Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate student Itay Budin has received the Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s 2012 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement during graduate studies in the biological sciences. Budin’s research focuses on understanding the selective pressures that drove the transition from primitive to modern cell membranes. He is one of twelve graduates from those nominated nationwide to receive the award on the basis of the quality, originality, and significance of their work. [more]
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DNA damage is a fact of life for all living organisms. Some have estimated that each of our human cells absorbs thousands of damaging events each and every day. Left uncorrected, such damage can lead to permanent, disruptive, changes in the genome, and cause various diseases including cancer. Without an active method of patrolling the genome for damage, and repairing it when found, life on earth would not last very long. [more]
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In 1954, Olds and Milner discovered that direct, electrical stimulation of particular brain areas was powerfully rewarding: rats would compulsively press a lever to obtain stimulation, ignoring naturally-rewarding stimuli such as food, water or mates. More recent work has shown that drugs of abuse hijack these reward systems, which results in compulsive drug taking in addicts. [more]
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Faithful chromosome segregation during cell division keeps cells alive and keeps cancer and birth defects at bay. A chromosome’s movements during mitosis are directed by its kinetochore, a specialized multi-protein structure that assembles on a specialized DNA sequence (the centromere) and binds to and moves along microtubules, the stiff filaments that make up the football-shaped spindle. To get the two sister chromosomes to segregate away from each other and end up at opposite ends of the spindle, their sister kinetochores must attach to microtubules from opposite spindle poles. [more] |
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Retroviruses, like all viruses, rely on host protein machinery to carry out every step in their life cycle. Therefore, while it is expected that retroviruses such as HIV-1 have evolved highly conserved sequences, it is perhaps less appreciated that these sequences often form specific three-dimensional structures to integrate, express and package their minimal RNA genomes. [more]
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Scientists in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) and Center for Brain Science (CBS) have launched a high-tech effort to map the brain’s “wiring diagram” and how it is shaped by early experience, seeking the causes of – and potential treatments for – schizophrenia, autism, retardation and other disorders.
Researchers in a new Silvio O. Conte Center funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) are focusing on critical periods in brain development, when the effects of abnormal genes and environmental stresses can lead to miswired connections in key areas of the brain. [more]
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A special federal grant for bold, outside-of-the-box biomedical proposals has been awarded to an MCB team with an ambitious plan to map the entire wiring network of the brain, using cutting-edge tools they have developed.
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Paul Doty, Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry, Emeritus, Director Emeritus, Center for Science and International Affairs died at home on 5 December 2011 at the age of 91 : he had a huge impact on science and international affairs. [more] |
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For the seventh year in a row, MCB Building Operation is organizing the Departmental Holiday Gift Drive. [more]
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A powerful way to treat genetic diseases and combat viral infections would be to turn off disease-associated genes. This can be accomplished using a process called RNA interference (RNAi), whereby double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) introduced inside a cell programs gene-specific silencing. However, a major challenge for the development of effective therapeutic RNAi is how to deliver the dsRNA into cells. This is referred to as “the delivery problem”. [more]
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The three heads on the wall of Hopi Hoekstra’s office belong to the same species of blesboks, a South African antelope with a characteristic blaze on the snout. But one is dark brown, the second medium brown and the third pale – a dramatic example of the color pattern variation that Hoekstra studies in a smaller species, deer mice in the genus Peromyscus. “Deer mice are the most abundant mammal in North America and live in almost every habitat, so there’s great opportunity for adaptation to novel environments,” she explains. That gives her a great opportunity to look for the DNA changes responsible for adaptive variation. [more] |
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This year’s Bloch Lecture will be given by Steven Chu, the United States Secretary of Energy. The title of his lecture will be “The Role of Science, Technology and Innovation in solving the Energy Challenge”. Prior to becoming the DOE secretary, Steve was the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at UC Berkeley. His research interests span atomic physics, polymer physics, biophysics, and most recently energy science. [more]
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For the sixth year, MCB Building Operations is organizing the annual Thanksgiving Food Drive. [more]
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"The MCB department unanimously supported the promotion of Victoria D'Souza and Andres Leschziner to the rank of Associate Professors of Molecular and Cellular Biology based on their stellar research, in the study of retroviral RNAs for Victoria D'Souza, in the study of large multi-protein machines by cryo-EM for Andres Leschziner, as well as on the excellence of their teaching and wonderful citizenship in the Department," says Catherine Dulac, MCB Department chair. [more]
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Unlike humans, most animals rely heavily on scents to collect information about their external environment, and in particular assess the friendly or not-so-friendly nature of encounters with other animals. For example, chemical signals (including pheromones) play an important role in the detection of a mating partner nearby, or of a competing male, and of predators looking for food. The robust and stereotyped behavioral responses triggered by pheromones in insects and vertebrates have fascinated scientists for more than a century. However, the molecular and neural basis of how these chemosignals are perceived in mammals haveremained unclear until recently. [more]
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Ghazaleh Ashrafi and Jeremiah Cohen received prizes given annually for outstanding research achievement at the Department’s retreat at Woods Hole in September. [more]
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Two MCB faculty members, Florian Engert and Sharad Ramanathan, are recipients of the 2011 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award Program. This program supports individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose innovative and possibly transforming approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research. Recipients receive a grant of up to $500,000 direct costs per year for five years to conduct a project that is substantially different from those already being pursued in the investigator’s laboratory or elsewhere. The Pioneer Award Program was established in 2004 as part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, a high-risk research initiative of Research Teams of the Future intended to accelerate the translation of research into improved health. [more]
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Eukaryotic cells target a large fraction of proteins synthesized in the cytosol to a number of different intracellular membrane compartments (organelles). Membrane targeting information is typically contained in hydrophobic signal sequences, which specify the organellar destination of proteins they are attached to. These molecular zipcodes are read out by specialized chaperones, called targeting factors (TFs), which tightly bind to them soon after they emerge from the ribosome. Upon encountering TF receptors on the cytosolic surface of organelles, TFs let go of their substrates, thus enabling them to be inserted into or translocated across organellar membranes. Our understanding of how TF receptors disrupt TF-substrate complexes is still rudimentary. [more]
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Brain functions, such as language, are shaped by experience during windows of heightened plasticity in early life. For example, children raised in an English- speaking environment will easily distinguish the phonemes /la/ and /ra/, whereas those growing up in Japan find it increasingly difficult. The underlying sites of plasticity along the auditory pathway, as well as potential mechanisms engaged during such 'critical periods' remain largely unknown.. [more]
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The Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Rachelle Gaudet has received tenure at Harvard University. Gaudet first came to Harvard in 1998 for postdoctoral work in Don Wiley’s MCB lab after completing her B. Sc. in Biochemistry at Université de Montréal, Canada and her Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University. She joined the MCB faculty in 2002. [more] |
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Gene expression is controlled by a class of proteins called transcription factors. These proteins usually bind to short 6-8 base pair DNA sequences in the regulatory regions (promoters) of genes. It is thought that such DNA binding sequences constitute a set of cis codes that help determine which genes are turned on by a given transcription factor. [more]
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Gene expression is controlled by a class of proteins called transcription factors. These proteins usually bind to short 6-8 base pair DNA sequences in the regulatory regions (promoters) of genes. It is thought that such DNA binding sequences constitute a set of cis codes that help determine which genes are turned on by a given transcription factor. [more]
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A fundamental question in developmental biology is how multi-potent cells choose a fate. While we know a lot about how cell states are maintained through growing amounts of large scale data, we know little about how cells make transitions between these states. [more]
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Erin O'Shea is a world leader in studies of gene regulation, but a world champion? That’s a title reserved for her German Shepherd, Zambo, fresh back from an international competition called the Universal Sieger in Austria this June. Sieger is German for winner, and Zambo was the overall winner of this two-part championship, which involved a “best of breed” conformation show evaluating his physical perfection and a Schutzhund trial, testing his tracking, obedience and protection skills. [more]
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Sharad Ramanathan, Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Assistant Professor of Applied Physics (SEAS) has been selected as one of 22 Pew Scholars in Biomedical Sciences for 2011 by the Pew Charitable Trusts. He will receive $60,000 a year for four years from the program. [more]
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Briana Burton, Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB), is one of seven recipients of the 2011 Rita Allen Foundation Scholars award. In addition, she has been chosen from among all the awardees to be named the 2011 Milton E. Cassel Scholar. Milton E. Cassel Scholars receive an extra stipend. All told, she will receive a grant of $110,000 annually for five years.[more]
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In spring 2011, two graduate students in the Molecular and Cellular Biology department received prestigious awards. [more] |
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Four undergraduates – Yunsoo Kim in Craig Hunter's lab; Siyuan (John) Liu in Sharad Ramanathan’s lab; Alissa D'Gama in Joshua Sanes’s lab; and Veronica Shi in Alexander Schier’s lab – received a total of five awards for their undergraduate theses in the Molecular and Cellular Biology concentration. Yunsoo Kim and Siyuan (John) Liu both received the college-wide Hoopes Prize for Excellence in the Work of Undergraduates. Yunsoo Kim also received the departmental Henderson Prize, as did Alissa D'Gama and Veronica Shi. [more] |
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At least since the 1950s studies of sensory systems have been divided into two largely non-overlapping, perspectives: one is neuroethological, organismic, and concerned with understanding how the animal senses its environment and the brain’s role in guiding behavior. The other is neurophysiological: it tries to understand the function of neurons and connections in sensory circuits by probing them under well-controlled experimental conditions. Here the subject is typically anesthetized or restrained, connected by cables to laboratory equipment, and the stimuli are abstract and designed to favor subsequent mathematical analysis. [more] |
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Circadian clocks are biological oscillators that help organisms keep track of the time of the day and coordinate their behavior with the rising and setting of the sun. These clocks are found across a broad range of organisms from bacteria to flies to humans. Despite their diversity of origins, all circadian clocks tend to share certain defining features characteristic of their biological function. Importantly, these clocks are truly self-sustained, and if an organism is kept in the lab in a constant environment its circadian clock will continue to robustly oscillate. [more] |
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has named Catherine Dulac, PhD and Cori Bargmann, PhD as co-recipients of the 11th Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize.
The Perl prize carries a $10,000 award and is given to recognize a seminal achievement in neuroscience. Past recipients have included four subsequent winners of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. This year’s award honors Dulac and Bargmann for the “discovery of chemosensory circuits that regulate social behaviors.”
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Robert Tjian was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley where he did research with Daniel Koshland. He then came to graduate school at Harvard obtaining his PhD in 1976 in the former Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology on “Transcriptional Specificity Determinants of Bacillus subtilis RNA polymerase.” While at Harvard, Tjian was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and, after completing his PhD. [more]
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Over the last decade, there have been a string of remarkable studies dealing with the characterization of noise in gene regulatory networks and signaling pathways. However, noise has often been regarded as a nuisance that affects cellular behavior and that can be reduced by the use of feedback loops. By contrast, our study is using a unifying framework to establish that in some cases cellular response to stimuli and noise are interdependent traits.
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Microbes (including bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protists) are ubiquitous on Earth and affect every part of our lives, yet they are mostly invisible. Microbial scientists believe the vast majority of microbes are still unknown to us. On Saturday, April 16, eight prominent microbial scientists hailing from a wide variety of disciplines will share their investigations into these enigmatic microbes during the Eighth Annual Microbial Sciences Symposium. This all-day event, which is free and open to the public, is hosted by the Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative and will be held in the Radcliffe Gymnasium at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies on the Cambridge campus. [more] |
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This year's Prather Lectures will be given by Cori Bargmann, a pioneer in the field of learning and memory behavioral genetics who has focused much of her work on the genetics and neurobiology of the worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. [more] |
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Professor John Kuriyan will present the 2011 Paul Doty Lecture on March 8, 2011. This lecture is presented annually to celebrate the scientific and public policy achievements of Professor Paul Doty, founder of both the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (currently, Molecular and Cellular Biology) and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. [more] |
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Professors at large research universities have two important responsibilities: generating new knowledge and educating students. Sometimes these missions are seen as being in competition. Indeed, we have all heard the term “teaching load” and at some institutions professors can buy out of teaching (“teaching release”) with large grant support. I have been lucky enough to win funding from the HHMI through its Professors program to support educational activities. [more] |
