the latest news

• Bruno Afonso comes to us from Aravi Samuel’s lab after finishing his graduate studies in Pam Silver’s lab in Harvard’s Systems Biology Department. His project in the Samuel lab is to head up the phototaxis events of the Larval Fly Olympiad at Janelia Farms, screening Gerry Rubin’s collection of very specific Gal4 lines for effects on phototaxis. He is visiting our lab for the summer to build his rigs and get up to speed on the genetics of his screen before heading down to Ashburn.
• Josh Chapman is a pre-med undergrad at Harvard’s extension school, and has joined the lab as a volunteer to work with Sean on his gait plasticity project. Specifically, they are investigating the extent to which injured flies exhibit deficits in their walking behavior (and to what extent they can then recover from these injuries) using a modified version of Buridan’s Assay.
• Also, congratulations to Sarah Zhang ’11!

Sean, Ben and Liz headed down the east coast to Ashburn, Virginia, and the campus (and IKEA-inspired James Bond villain lair) of HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus. The meeting topic was vision in flies, narrowed this year to focus on physiology and behavior to the partial exclusion of developmental talks. The star of the show was the Elementary Motion Detector, and its instantiation in the lamina and lobula plate of the fly brain. Is the EMD a Reichardt detector? Seems likely. Will science identify neurons corresponding to all of its components? Yes, probably, and probably within the next 5-10 years.

The earthquake in Japan delayed the arrival of the keynote speaker, Dale Purvis, and his talk about how visual illusions are not errors in perception, but adaptations to the statistical structure of natural scenes. The ensuing scheduling shuffle moved Ben’s talk from the very last slot to the very first, the upside of which was many more opportunities to discuss fly phototactic personality with attendees including Martin Heisenberg, Ian Meinertzhagen, Vivek Jayaraman and Michael Reiser.

The wildlife at Janelia is abundant – deer in the meadows; frogs, water-striders, Canada geese, great blue herons, and hooded mergansers on the pond, and dragon flies on the pond and in the Leonardo lab.

On the topic of the study of behavioral diversity, we are very glad to welcome Sarah Zhang (Harvard 2011) into the lab for her neuroscience thesis research this fall and spring. Sarah began her work this summer by optimizing our apparatus for measuring the light preference of flies at rest, and is planning to look for differences in this behavior between natural populations of flies.

[Ben's aside:] In putting this display together this weekend, I was taken by the particular beauty of each specimen. Without exception there were fascinating details in every one of them – high contrast iridescent patterning on their underbellies, seemingly arbitrary folds and indentations in their elytra, compound eyes engulfing the basal segments of the antennae, etc. From my own experience working on the taxonomy of the mite harvestmen (Opiliones: Cyphophthalmi) with Gonzalo Giribet, I know even the most drab, unassuming, uncharismatic creatures become subtle works of evolutionary beauty and intricacy when you have studied them in detail. While there may only be a few dozen scientists in the world that can name off the top of their head the species names of any of these specimens, each species could be the worthy basis of a full lifetime’s career of research.

So far we are achieving at least fifteen-fold increases in data collected per hour compared to manual phototaxis trials, and are planning to use this higher throughput for deeper screening of animals which are hybrids of parental strains with differential phototaxis behavior.

Arriving in San Francisco a couple days before the conference, we visited our respective families a bit before starting the Pacific coast highway road trip from Concord to Ventura. Trip highlights: local sourdough bread, artichoke soup, dungeness crab and berry pie at Duarte’s in Pescadero – seals, tide pools, and beach combing at Bean Hollow Beach – Big Sur – stargazing in San Simeon – hiking and wild aloe plants in Cayucos – breakfast in San Luis Obispo – hiking the groves and beaches of Goleta – vegan dinner in Santa Barbara.

We met up with Liz at the conference site, as well as her friend Johanna Kowalko, who studies the evolution of behavior in cavefish in Cliff Tabin’s lab. The meeting was well paced, with plenty of time to mingle with the other attendees and peruse the research posters on the first two days. Local excursions filled the afternoon in the last two days, including a wine-tasting tour on which we caught, and started a wild-isolate stock from, an enophilic female Drosophila. Jamey presented his work on mapping the loci underlying strain differences in phototaxis behavior – Sean, his results demonstrating plasticity in fly walking behavior following injury – Ben, the current status of the apparatus for capturing single-fly walking motion and leg position – Liz, her results characterizing the negative phototaxis of young larval Drosophila.

On Thursday afternoon, St. Patrick’s Day, we met up with our old friend from graduate school, Jae Hur. He is studying the genetics of aging in Drosophila in David Walker’s lab at UCLA. The visit included a trip to Ventura harbor where we watched large waves breaking as the sun set over the Channel Islands, and live music with mexican dinner.